Yet another DIY kit: Bitalino, “Biosignals for Everyone”. Inexpensive sensors for whole body interfaces, with “arduino inspired” hardware and software kits—how is this not the right idea!
Now I get quite nervous about connecting electrodes to the body, so I had to look carefully at this. Fortunately, these guys do know what they are doing (see this article), and have designed well. You can still hurt yourself if you try, but generally Bitalino should be a good foundation for safe devices.
The kit includes modules designed to pick up electrical activity from skin and muscle, which can implement heart monitoring (EKG). The board and software also makes it easy to collect and process these signals, and feed them to applications.
I admit that I misread the information at first, thinking it could also do brain waves (EEG), but I don’t think it can. Rats–I know what I would do with that! Maybe Bitalino 2.0 will do that.
But this kit should theoretically enable you to create simple activity and emotion sensors, for applications or as part of a computer interface.
This low cost toolkit will also let people discover just how non-trivial physiological sensing actually is. I note that the hardware and software are not compatible with the popular general purpose Arduino, because biosensing is a lot harder than general computing. Also, the basic data acquisition software will let you learn just how noisy and messy the actual signals are, and how difficult it can be to find reasonable signals.
Very cool!
- Silva, Hugo, Ana Fred, and Raúl Martins, Biosignals for Everyone. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 13 (4):64-71, 2014. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6926682
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