Workshop Hosted by Media Lab Showcases Body Sensors

The Body Sensor Network (BSN) 2006 International Workshop, held April 3-5 in MIT Media Lab, highlighted the dramatic changes that computing innovations have made in healthcare and health monitoring. The workshop included presentations and poster sessions covering such topics as wearable and implantable sensors.

Joseph Paradiso, director of Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group and co-organizer of the three-year-old international event, noted in his introduction to the proceedings, “We hope this workshop becomes a Rosetta Stone that keeps us all communicating to build out the future of physiological interfaces between people and computation.”

MIT Media Lab’s postdoctoral associate Rana el Kaliouby, graduate student Alea Teeters and Professor Rosalind Picard of media arts and sciences, led the session on clinical applications with a moving presentation on how a small video camera worn on a chest-high antenna can be used as a “social-emotional prosthetic” to help people with autism spectrum disorders learn to identify and decode their own and others’ facial expressions.

John Wyatt, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, described his work in developing a retinal implant for people with visual disabilities. He described how an implant containing a 10-micron-thick microelectrode array could restore a “useful level of vision” to patients suffering from outer retinal diseases, such as macular degeneration.

BSN presenters displayed wearable sensors like HealthGear, a real-time wearable system that monitors blood oxygen during sleep and detects sleep apnea. “Smart” clothes, such as the MyHeart instrumented shirt, a close-fitting sleeveless shirt 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 were also showcased.

Other presenters on clinical applications showed how sensors applied to the arm can assess the motor abilities and progress of people recovering from strokes and how a pervasive body sensor network could monitor the recovery of postoperative patients. A presentation was done on the wireless sensor system that helps in treating dyskinesia, the involuntary writhing movements associated with Parkinson’s disease. The workshop also focused on how to provide power to fabrics and gadgets for computation and how to protect individual privacy and security.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology