Pusing Human Performance

This week in radio: Fuzzy Logic 2XX FM's Rod Taylor interviewed Leif Hanlen, on how NICTA is "pushing human performance"

You can listen online: http://fuzzylogicon2xx.podbean.com

What does it take to win an olympic gold medal? Humans are pushing the limits of performance. The difference between a gold and a tin medal can be a tiny percent. In today's ultra competetive events you need every ounce, and the ability to closely monitor an athelete during training can be key.

Dr Leif Hanlen is a senior researcher at Australia's IT research body NICTA where they are building devices for real-time evaluation of atheletes. But it's not just about elite sport stars because anybody who wants their health closely monitored will be interested. Then, what do you do with the data? This can be mined for insights into the individual or the population.

Leif interviewed by Rod, Arwen and Michael, who also brought his own beautiful music into this show.

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.