What is BioMOBIUS™?

TRIL Centre's BioMOBIUS™ Research Platform: An Open, Shareable Software and Hardware System supports the rapid creation of technology solutions for biomedical research and more. The BioMOBIUS research platform is built on the EyesWeb XMI software platform (www.eyesweb.org), an open software platform developed by InfoMus Lab at the University of Genoa for research on multimodal interfaces, non-verbal expressive gesture and movement analysis and recognition, and it is applied in a number of research environments and applications, including music, performing arts, cultural and edutainment applications.

Building on the Eyesweb environment the BioMOBIUS™ research platform includes:

• support for SHIMMER wireless physiological and kinematic sensors.
• image processing and data analysis components
• data visualisation capabilities
• Support documentation and sample tutorials
• portable application kernel
• Graphical User Interface design tool

The use of sensors, cameras, computational devices and other biomedical monitoring devices is an essential enabler for many types of clinical research activities. The BioMOBIUS research platform enables therapists, clinicians and engineers to rapidly create combinations of hardware, software, services and sensors which monitor and report health related patient and research subjects data. The BioMOBIUS research platform is the TRIL Centre's common technology platform developed to support our own clinical, social and technology research and which we are now making available to the international research and development community.

A typical BioMOBIUS research platform solution includes hardware based sensing capabilities which monitors a particular physiological parameter, physical characteristic or personal behaviours, examples of which include gait stability, blood pressure, alertness or social activity. Collected data is then processing using a variety of in-built techniques which converts the sensor data into meaningful information for the clinician or therapist. A user interface enables the clinician or therapist to view the information and to adjust the settings used by the current solution. You can register to download the software component of the BioMOBIUS research platform from this site and to obtain additional information about how to source the hardware and sensors which it supports.

Who is the BioMOBIUS research platform for?

The BioMOBIUS research platform is aimed at clinicians and therapists who need, in the course of their work, to monitor and analyse the activity or other physiological characteristics of their patients or research subjects.

The BioMOBIUS research platform enables engineers, clinicians and therapisits to decrease the time and effort expended in the development of bespoke technology solutions. . While hardware and software are essential elements of much research, they are enablers, rather than the central component of clinical and theraputic research itself. By reducing the time spent on technology development, clinicians and therapists have more time to focus their core research questions and therapeutic protocol development.

The BioMOBIUS research platform can be used directly by clinicians and therapists to seamless acquire, process, present and store data generated by sensors, cameras and other types of hardware. In most cases, however, they will benefit from assistance from biomedical engineers in developing an application based on the BioMOBIUS research platform system. Once developed and tested, the system can be adjusted and customised by the clinician, using an intitutive graphical user interface.

What does the BioMOBIUS research platform consist of?

The BioMOBIUS research platform comprises of hardware, software and services components. Central to the BioMOBIUS research platform rapid application development is a graphical development environment and component toolkit for building physiological, monitoring, interaction and biosignal applications. For example, biosignal applications can collect raw physiological data on specific activities or characteristics of research subjects, and present this data to clinicians and therapists. The underlying software model in the BioMOBIUS research platform relies on the use of discrete functional components (blocks) which can be combined in user defined combinations to, create specific applications. Where a block for a particular function does not exist, The BioMOBIUS research platform supports the design and development of new blocks which can easily be added to the existing library of blocks with seamless interoperability. It is designed to be an open shareable technology platform which fully supports the reuse of blocks for new applications while facilitating the rapid addition of new ones if reqiured.

How is the BioMOBIUS research platform used today?

BioMOBIUS research platform solutions are already in use by teams of researchers associated with the Technology Research for Independent Living Centre (the TRIL Centre), a collaboration between a number of partners including Intel Corporation, the Industrial Development Agency (IDA) Ireland, and a number of Irish Universities. Example solutions are a portable neurological monitor, a sleep quality application, and a Gait Analysis system using wireless sensors and USB cameras.

The BioMOBIUS research platform is an output of the TRIL Centre and its graphical development environment is built on the EyesWeb software platform, a gesture and movement recognition system developed by the University of Genoa , which has been applied in a number of research environments, primarily in music and the performing arts.

BioMOBIUS White Paper