Public hardware design for collecting data now online

The hardware design has been used in a number of measurement campaigns to evaluate performance of body-area-networks on and around the human body.

Details of the set-up and the PCB layout are available from the NICTA project page. We expect that as the standardization process moves forward, there will be a need to also standardize the measurement and modeling approaches used. Public hardware and data sets are an important part of this process.

Public data set for radio modeling around the human body released

We have just released our first dataset, of real radio measurements on a human subject, whilst they undertook everyday activities. The details include office work, driving home, cooking and watching television. 

The dataset is available from the HPI project website

Research assistant enrols as post-graduate student

Having worked as a research assistant with HPI since July 2009, Ms. Vasanta Chaganti has now enrolled at the Australian National University as a Research Masters post-graduate student, in Telecommunications. Ms. Chaganti is currently developing new time-variable models of radio channels for the human body.

Talking shop: network interference

So we've got the transceivers running and taking measurements, and have measured a significant number of dense networks on the human body -- 20 or more nodes. We'll be presenting some of the preliminary work tomorrow at the Australian National University but for tonight Leif is testing out the impact of sleep on wireless sensor networks.

This is partly because sleep is a big part of most people's everyday lives, but also (specifically why Leif) because if the project leader won't do it, it's hard to convince other volunteers.

The details of the presentation are here

Human Performance Improvement @ NICTA TechFest

Next week is TechFest at NICTA - so we're off to Sydney.


We'll be showing how the human body creates havoc for a radio connection with our wireless radio jacket: it's bright green (of course) and has small radio transceivers in pockets. The transceivers are used as part of our radio modeling work for the IEEE 802.15.6 standards, but we bring them out with a demo which shows the radio strength as a bubble moving between the sensors. Dance around and watch the bubbles react.

Last year we had a similar demo (it wasn't wireless then) which used sound pitch to mimic the radio strength, but we figured this year we'd lower the noise factor.


We'll also be demo-ing the sensor glove - which is a glove with inertial sensors and a bluetooth connection. The work we do with this is related to modeling human movement, and demonstrating the data requirements for raw signal processing: we don't build micro-sensors.

For the demo we're encouraging everyone to try playing a virtual piano.