Since a while I am interested in interacting with Biological systems. Specially in the field of body sensory data.
Last year I had a hackathon and I wanted to measure body signals together with a student physiotherapy. At that moment I could not find the right competences to get it to work so I decided to work on another subject. Later I met a master student at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Together we are working on a project which uses biofeedback. With the feedback we visualize it and that is really interesting. This project is all about measuring the EMG/ECG signals from the body.
This all really got me into the biofeedback. I discussed it with my physiotherapist and from one comes another. Mid 2015 I met Arie Rommers at a hackathon. A long time ago he lost his arm. Since a couple of years he has the Bebionic3. That is a myoelectric prosthetic arm which can respond to electrical signals from the existing muscles. It would be nice to improve the arm by adding feeling to the hand.
Now Arie can only use the hand when he can see the action take place. Wouldn’t it be nice if he could grab stuff without looking at them? The idea is to add sensors to the exterior of the hand and start measuring. Pressure can be measured, but also Time Of Flight sensors can be used to estimate the distance still to the object. Feedback can be given to the arm by applying pressure using a servo.
Here is a compilation of other items I am also working on:
- Myo armband sensing EMG signals on the arm
- The Olimex EKG-EMG shield
- The I2C BodyNode
- Earlobe sensor to measure bloodsugar levels to prevent nightly hypo’s, based on the work of Khan, “Non-Invasive blood glucose monitoring using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy”, Medical Design Center, EDN Network, 2013.
- Wrist sensor to measure body temperature and conductivity. The goal is to measure nightly Hypoglycemia events and alarm on them.
- Sensing distance and pressure to hack a bionic arm.
- Respiration sensors. When a person has regular breathing, the stress hormone cortisol lowers significantly.
- Finger/earlobe sensor for measuring oxynation of the blood
- Spectrometer which is small enough to be used in measuring bloodsugar levels
I have a tricoder in mind, the holy grail in medicine. In 2230 it will be invented but maybe we can beat that year. I want to start off with a t-shirt and measure all data there and see where I end up.