The Technology Research for Independent Living (TRIL) Centre has released the BioMOBIUS Research Platform.
The BioMOBIUS Research Platform is a combination of hardware, sensors, software, services and a graphical development environment. This platform helps researchers to reduce the time spent on developing foundational technologies, allowing them to focus on their actual research. Ultimately the platform will enable therapists, clinicians and engineers to rapidly develop and deploy technology solutions for biomedical research.
A key challenge in healthcare research is the amount of time that is consumed by technology development. In a typical research project, a significant amount of the researcher’s time may be spent creating the foundational technologies required to get to the point of collecting data. The BioMOBIUS Research Platform addresses this issue, allowing researchers to leverage previous technology development efforts and making significant savings in development time overheads. It is a reusable, user-friendly and extensible platform with modest technical requirements. The BioMOBIUS Research Platform software is based on the EyesWeb graphical development environment, created at the University of Genoa, which makes the process of application development efficient and intuitive.
The BioMOBIUS Research Platform was developed by the TRIL Centre, a research collaboration between Intel Corporation and a number of Irish academic partners, and jointly funded by Intel and the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) Ireland. Its goal is to explore technology to help older people to continue living independently. The platform is being used primarily by TRIL researchers to help clinicians detect and prevent or alleviate certain conditions related to ageing, such as falls and cognitive decline, and to help older people to strengthen their social connections.
The BioMOBIUS Research Platform software is being made freely available to the research community by the TRIL Centre and can be downloaded from http://biomobius.trilcentre.org. The site also hosts a number of online support tools for the platform such as documentation, guidelines, tutorials and a discussion forum. The BioMOBIUS Research Platform incorporates support for a variety of hardware via wired and wireless interfaces such as SHIMMER (Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Reusability). SHIMMER, developed by Intel and licensed to Realtime Technologies, is a small wireless hardware platform designed explicitly for wearable health sensing, and supporting both connected (via wireless) and disconnected (flash memory card) data capture. Realtime Technologies will further develop, manufacture and distribute SHIMMER. When combined with the BioMOBIUS Research Platform, SHIMMER provides a significant opportunity to improve both patient care and quality of life.
