Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm Demonstrates Shimmer at TEDMED
June 30, 2010TEDMED has released the presentation given by Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm at the conference last October. Jacobs shares his vision for the future of Wireless Healthcare where people will always feel in touch with their doctor, and their health can be monitored at all times for when something goes wrong. This he notes will be realised by wearable wireless sensors, to improve individuals’ healthcare from aiding acute and chronic conditions, to a person’s general health and wellbeing. Jacobs demonstrates a Shimmer on the 7:25 mark, which monitors the activity of a person whilst the data is being remotely interpreted in real time.
The program interpreting and displaying the data captured can be viewed on an interview conducted with Paul Jacobs at TEDMED. The program is displayed on the 1:50 mark – view video.
Tags: Conferences, Connected Health, Healtcare, Paul Jacobs, press coverage, Qualcomm, Sensor, shimmer, TEDMED, Tele-Health, Wireless, world events
Shimmer Research Continues R+D in Conjunction with Post-Doctoral Fellowships under IRCSET’s Enterprise Partnership Scheme
June 25, 2010Kieran Daly, VP of Business Development at Shimmer Research was recently interviewed by John Kennedy of Digital 21 in relation to the importance of PhD graduates in developing R+D projects, innovation, and real business opportunities.
Commenting on Shimmer Research’s sustained commitment to wireless sensing innovation, Kieran Daly describes current collaboration being conducted in the area of integrating wireless sensors into garments, and the importance of IRCSET’s enterprise partnership scheme to the project.
You can view the full article on Digital 21’s website, along with a video clip with Kieran Daly being interview in the websites video section titled: ‘Digital-21-IRCSET’. Kieran is interviewed on the 1:10 mark.
Tags: Collaboration, Digital 21, Garments, IRCSET, press coverage, Sensor, shimmer, Wearable
Blueforce Development Announces Integration of Shimmer Wireless Sensor Platform
June 10, 2010Blueforce Development will integrate and support the Shimmer Wireless Sensor Platform for its product offerings in the defense, homeland security, and intelligence community markets
Press Release:
June 8, 2010 – Blueforce Development, Salem, MA: Shimmer Research and Blueforce Development Corporation have partnered to deliver state of the art technology which enhances life safety and mission efficiency for national security teams working in “last tactical mile” environments. The combined solution will provide an aggregated situational awareness “heartbeat” by interfacing with person-attached biotelemetry, environmental, and life safety sensors. Coupled with Shimmer’s embedded gyroscope and accelerometer, this combined solution offers an unprecedented level of situational awareness for each and every team member using Blueforce Tactical software as part of their national security mission.
Blueforce’s patent-pending mobile software enables the rapid formation of tactical teams and facilitates secure information sharing amongst team members using Windows Mobile Smartphones and PDAs. The software provides shared awareness and extended presence of people, sensors, and services; and it enables secure information exchange between them via standard cellular, WIFI, WiMAX, satellite, and/or mesh networks. Shimmer™ is a small wireless sensor platform designed to support wearable applications. The partnership between Shimmer Research and Blueforce Development facilitates a whole new suite of Blueforce products using a single Blueforce software plugin that communicates to the Shimmer hardware interface thereby providing awareness of a multitude of person-attached sensors. This combination will have a profound impact on life safety, mission efficiency, and the movement of perishable tactical mission data amongst team members and commanders.
“For the first time, we can fuse heartrate, respiration, and body temperature biotelemetry of a first responder or warfighter with other sensor data, such as that coming off of a belt-attached chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, explosive (CBRNE) sensor or any other sensors attached to the body. Blueforce aggregates this data for each team member using Blueforce software installed on their cell phone, and makes it sharable on a need-to-know basis with the rest of a team,” said Michael Helfrich, Blueforce Founder and CEO. “Combine this with native collaboration capabilities and interior and exterior location tracking capabilities that Blueforce provides, and teams have the ultimate mobile tactical decision support solution.”
Kieran Daly VP Business Development – Shimmer Research said, “We are delighted to work with Blueforce Development and are very excited by the potential of this relationship. Our joint efforts will enable Blueforce to further advance their technology which will firmly establish the company as market leader in the national security field. ”
About Blueforce Development Corporation
Blueforce Development Corporation is a software company, headquartered and incorporated in Massachusetts, which has built a patent-pending software platform that enables information sharing among people using mobile, handheld, wireless devices. The software provides shared awareness and extended presence of people, sensors, and services; and it facilitates secure information exchange between each of the endpoints. For more information about Blueforce products and services, visit our website at http://www.blueforcedev.com.
About Shimmer Research
Shimmer is a wireless sensor platform that allows the user to record and transmit a wide range of physiological and sensor data. Shimmer enables interaction with your environment by providing a wireless sensing solution that is small, lightweight, and has low power consumption, which can easily integrate and interact with existing technologies. Shimmer information is available at www.shimmer-research.com.
Latest News Items about Shimmer and Shimmer Research
May 25, 2010Healthy Horizon’s Alex de Jong recently interviewed Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm. Jacob’s talks about the advances in personalised medicine and the various ways in which wireless technology is transforming the healthcare sector as a whole – from increasing the productivity of doctors to improving patient care. Featured in the short video clip is a Shimmer acting as an Activity Monitor, worn around the neck a toy ‘Cookie Monster’. View the Paul Jacobs Interview … Shimmer is displayed on the 1:50 mark.
Shimmer Research was hailed as one of Ireland’s ‘inventive tech firms getting a head start in Ireland’s economic recovery’ in an article by Roisin Burke in the Sunday Independent. The article details a number of Irish companies involved in innovative technologies with large potential for future growth, and talks about some of the current uses and future developments associated with the Shimmer platform. Read the Sunday Independent Article.
Finally, a current blog item on Health Informatics Forum details the content of the recently held ‘Wireless Sensing Research and Connected Health Activities in Ireland’ conference which was hosted by Shimmer Research and Realtime Technologies this May. To get a nice synopsis of the event, please visit the Health Informatics Forum blog.
TRIL Centre Uses Shimmer GSR in Creating an Alertness Training Programme
May 6, 2010The TRIL centre has recently published an article outline their work in developing an Alertness Training Programme. The programme is aimed at improving the attention and alertness of older people, which is seen to have a significant effect on how well they function at home and in their communities, and ultimately on their ability to live independently.
The device which was designed specifically with the end user in mind utilises a Shimmer GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) sensor to indicate and record levels of alertness by the user. The Shimmer GSR is integrated into a cushion like design which makes the device appear less medical or technical and therefore more approachable to non-technically inclined older adults.
Operation
Two leads protrude from the device, and Velcro loops with embedded sensors are worn on the fingers. When the device is switched on, it takes a baseline GSR reading. The user presses the grey button before self-alerting, and the on-screen graph spikes upward to indicate a higher level of alertness, as measured by galvanic skin response. The GSR data is recorded to a micro-SD card, for later analysis.
To read the full article, please select the following link
Tags: Aging, Alertness, BioFeedback, Galvanic Skin Response, GSR, press coverage, shimmer, TRIL
Intel’s Eric Dishman Highlights Shimmer to a US Senate Special Sub-Committee on Aging
In a recent testimony to a US Senate Special Sub-Committee on Aging, Eric Dishman reflected on the persistent barriers that prevent the widespread implementation of telehealth, aging-in-place, and what Continua calls “e-care” (for “electronic care”) technologies.
He opened his testimony by introducing two new technologies which he feels are key to the implementation of e-care systems. One of the two technologies he chose to introduce to the Senate Committee was Shimmer.
Utilising Shimmer to monitor the daily movements of seniors and predict when a fall may be likely to occur, Dishman believes that the technology can help reduce falls by as much as 70% or more. Currently one in every three people over the age of 65 fall each year, at an estimated cost of $44 billion to the US economy yearly by the end of this decade.
Read his full testimony by following this link.
A video of the testimony is also available on the above link, with Eric Dishman introduced to the committee at the 75.40 mark. He introduces Shimmer to the committee at the 76.45 mark.
Tags: Aging, e-care, e-health, Elderly, Eric Dishman, Fall Detection, Intel, shimmer, Tele-Health
Shimmer Research Launches New Span Platform
March 29, 2010Shimmer Research is proud to announce the launch of the new Span platform – a USB access point for the Shimmer’s low power 802.15.4 (base layer of Zigbee) solution.
The Span platform is a 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 radio module that plugs into the USB port on computing devices, to realise a low power radio transmitter, access point, or receiver in a wireless system with devices like Shimmer. It will work with a laptop and many smaller mobile devices, and the platform has received FCC, ETSI, Industry Canada and CE Certification. Span uses the popular combination of an MSP430 processor and a CC2420 radio transceiver. Dedicated FTDI USB UARTs are utilised for communication and programming.
The Span platform will facilitate users to established and realise the full benefit of Shimmer’s on board 802.15.4 radio for low power communications, and power conscious applications. This plug and play set-up will allow for rapid deployment in mesh networks, wireless sensor networking, wireless medical devices, on body data acquisition, inertial sensing, and education.
Key Features:
The Span platform adds low power 2.4GHz 802.15.4 radio communication to computing devices, and has an open source software library. Due to its attractive and sleek enclosure, Span doesn’t block adjacent USB ports when in use, and there is a FTDI UART driver support in Windows, Linux, Mac and other popular operating systems. Shimmer supports the mainstream TinyOS CC2420 radio stack and our own IP-over-802.15.4 stack.
For more information – visit our product page here.
Intel’s Eric Dishman – Talking about the Shimmer platform at TEDMED
March 25, 2010Eric Dishman (Chief Strategist and Global Director of Product Research, Innovation and Policy for Intel’s Digital Health Group) gave a talk at TEDMED 2009 titled ‘Take Health Care off the Mainframe’. He highlights the importance of behavioural markers in the early diagnosis of a medical issues for the elderly, and talks about how Intel have been utilising Shimmer in areas including fall prevention, tremor analysis to check for trends in motor deficiencies, gait analysis, and stride length.
Dishman pulls a Shimmer out of his sock at the 11.51 mark when addressing the issue of falls prevention for the elderly. Watch the video in full below:
Shimmer is compatible with Labview
February 8, 2010We are happy to announce that the Shimmer wireless sensor platform is now compatible with Labview and a DSC module is available that can be used for writing Labview applications.
The DSC module allows for straight forward creation of Labview applications.
Features of the module:
- Built-in networking for data sharing and integrating third-party devices
- Networked database for distributed data logging
- Configuration-based alarms and events
- Graphical development for distributed monitoring and control
- User-level security for applications
- Real-time and historical trending
More info on the module page.
Wireless Sensor Platform Launches New EMG and GSR Products and Receives CE Certification
January 27, 2010
PRESS RELEASE
Dublin, Ireland – January 21, 2010 – The Shimmer wireless sensor platform has recently been awarded the CE mark, proving it has met EU consumer health and safety requirements for medical equipment. The CE certification also includes the ECG, EMG, and Motion capture Products.
The CE Certification coincides with the launch of the platforms new EMG (Electromyography), and GSR (Galvanic Skin Response – for testing characteristics such as stress levels) products, and reflects the platforms continued advancement of wireless sensing innovation.
Marketed and developed by Shimmer Research the Shimmer wireless sensor platform now offers a wide range of wireless sensing possibilities from physiological and kinematic motion capture to tilt and vibration sensors. Commenting on the expanding range of wireless sensors Kieran Daly, VP of Business Development at Shimmer Research noted that the company is ‘committed to driving wireless sensing innovation by providing sensors that capture data to the highest industry standards’. Indeed, this was made evident by validation work carried out on the ECG, Motion, and GSR sensors for ambulatory ECG, Temporal Gait Analysis, and GSR data capture in biomedical research settings. The information captured by Shimmer was comparable to, or outperformed larger, traditional wired units that would be considered gold standard.
Remarking on the validation results, Daly stated that everybody at the company was ‘very pleased with the results, it’s a good representation of the quality the platform offers, and highlights how Shimmer performs against well known traditional wired units that can be costly and don’t offer the same flexibility’
To read the full Press Release, click here.
Tags: CE Certification, EMG, GSR, Launch, New Products, PR