Media Lab Hosts Workshop on Body Sensors

Here's a couple of the projects that were presented:

HealthGear, a real-time wearable system that monitors blood oxygen during sleep and may detect sleep apnea; "smart" clothes, such as the MyHeart instrumented shirt, a close-fitting sleeveless T with electrodes embedded in the fabric; and the EKG shirt, a prototype for a sensing T-shirt that measures an EKG signal through circuitry that has been embroidered on it with conductive yarn.

Smart clothes can be bulky. Eric Wade, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, and H. Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Mechanical Engineering, presented a paper on simplifying routing among connectors and integrating systems that use conductive fabrics, which are made of nylon and polyester with a silver, nickel or aluminum coating. They propose using one system to transmit both power and data between the central node and sensor nodes within a system. Asada is director of the Brit and Alex D'Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology.

Would have liked to attend this. They covered some interesting aspects of body sensor networks, such a s privacy, security, data storage, and the problem with trying to embed electronics into clothes.

[ Link via Google News ]