Biosensor Array

Key Dates

Week of 3/21 : Official Challenge Briefing / Q+A
3/25: Deadline to create your profile and submit your first blog update
4/1: Deadline for Hackerspace Challenge Blog Post 2
4/15: Deadline for Hackerspace Challenge Blog Post 3
4/30: End of build time
05/01- 05/05: Judging period
05/06: 3 semi-finalists will be announced
Week Of 5/16: One team member from each of the three semi-finalist hackerspaces will travel to San Francisco Bay Area
5/21/22: Maker Faire
5/22: Maker Faire Great Global Hackerspace Challenge Grand Finale
5/23: Team members travel home

Concept

Mitch Altman proposed a Global Hackerspace Challenge and PS:One accepted. We proposed the construction of an array of biosensors which could be used in a secondary school or college setting as an educational and experimental tool. The array will collect data from various sensors attached to the test subject's body and then make that data available to the experimenter. The project will use as many COTS parts as possible. The terms of the Challenge require that it use a microcontroller and a "portable power source".

The full description of the Challenge is at Global Hackerspace Challenge.

Members Involved

As of 15 Mar 2011:

Bill Mania
Avner Shanan
Shawn Blaszak
Philip Strong
Eric Hanley
Drew Fustini
LeRoy Pinto

Sensors and their Project Leaders

This list contains the proposed sensors, in order of decreasing priority. For each sensor, the persons leading the R and D are listed.

Body temperature - Phill, Shawn
oxygen saturation and heartrate - Phill
galvanic skin response - Phill
respiration frequency, volume and carbon dioxide output - Bill
ECG and EMG - Shawn, Avner
EEG Avner

The project must also include the following components:

microcontroller - Eric, Phill
data visualization design - Eric
mobile device interface - Bill

Notes

There is useful information available from the Open ECG and Open EEG projects.

Sensors

ECG

OpenECG: http://www.open-ecg-project.org
Wireless ECG: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/bionb440/FinalProjects/f2005/kwj5/index.html

EEG

OpenEEG: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/

Members

Bill Mania, http://manialabs.us/

For my part, I've been re-building my development environment for Python and Qt on the Nokia N900 mobile device. I've also been reading through "Building wireless sensor networks" by Robert Faludi, to get an idea of the wireless options available to us.