Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Open source health gadgets

Sports Watch
How would you like to have a 3-axis accelerometer, pressure sensor, temperature sensor, RF wireless, and an LCD screen in a development package? You can actually have it - as a wristwatch offered by Texas Instruments. for just $49.
The package includes a USB programming and emulation dongle so that you can develop your own firmware. It uses Texas Instrument’s SimpliciTI and BM Innovations’ Blue Robin RF protocols that enable developers to establish wireless links right out of the box. The firmware transforms it into a sports watch with heart rate monitor, it is written for Windows but could be adopted for other platforms too.
First hackers that got hold of the package used it to wirelessly unlock doors with the buttons and accelerometer. You could utilize other functionalities as well, and jog around while configuring your Linux.

Peripheral nerve stimulator


The jfish peripheral nerve stimulator is a device used in anesthesia or intensive care to assess the degree of neuromuscular blockade (normal communication between motor nerves and skeletal muscle can be blocked by a drug). The device can detect both the magnitude and type of neuromuscular blockade. Itis developed by Daniel Jolley, a doctor and anaesthetic registrar, at The Austin Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. His device uses Texas Instruments' MSP430 line of microcontrollers - ultra-low power 16-bit RISC mixed-signal computers-on-a-chip. Check the document ‘The science and use of the peripheral nerve stimulator‘ for how to use the stimulator.

OpenECG
Open source hardware and software solution for electrocardiography was presented at the
34th Annual Conference of the International Society for Computerized Electrocardiology
The device is battery powered, it can also use an isolation transformer plus defib protection in front of the op-amps on the front-end.

OpenEEGMany EEG-based gadgets - like Zeo personal sleep coach - are in the market. OpenEEGproject can assist your brain-computer interface, bi-directional serial communication or neurofeedback experiments. The modularEEG is currently the most popular of all the designs Check online documentation for more. Then, go to the SourceForge page and download the ModularEEG project zip-file. You will find schematics, board layouts and parts lists that can be ordered from various distributors.

What a paradise for Hackers - they can design gadgets and let other people manufacture them. The open source hardware companies are predicted to be making over one billion in revenues by 2015. Most of them are offering educational electronics, but some of the packages could be utilized for health gadget development. See this talk presented at O'Reilly's foo camp east 2010.


Open source hardware $1m and beyond - foo camp east 2010 from adafruit industries on VimReblog this post [with Zemanta]eo.

Aurametrix is working on low-cost personal diagnostic devices to improve individual health

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