Synchronization of time is essential for correlation of sensor data. For body area network the se... more Synchronization of time is essential for correlation of sensor data. For body area network the sensors are distributed over multiple sensor nodes located on different parts of the body. When collecting sensor data using wireless sensor networks, the delay variation can be up to 1000 milliseconds. Physiological sensors, like ECG, accelerometer and gyroscopes, require a timing accuracy in the millisecond range. This paper describes a generic method to provide synchronized timestamps. The method is tested in a Wireless sensor network using Bluetooth and Bluetooth Smart sensor nodes. Results show that the method is usable for correlating sensor data with 50ms sample rate.
The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population... more The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population trend, the increase in life-style related disease prevalence, as well as the increased treatment capabilities with associated general expectation all add pressure. The use of ambient healthcare technologies can alleviate the situation by enabling time and cost-efficient monitoring and follow-up of patients discharged from hospital care. We report on an ambulatory system developed for monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The system consists of a wearable multisensor monitoring device; a mobile phone with client application aggregating the data collected; a service-oriented-architecture based server solution; and a PC application facilitating patient follow-up by their health professional carers. The system has been tested and verified for accuracy in controlled environment trials on healthy volunteers, and also been usability tested by 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses. This investigation indicated that patients were able to use the system, and that nurses got an improved basis for patient follow-up.
The aim of the user study was to evaluate how the developed assistive physical keyboard, the Ezi-... more The aim of the user study was to evaluate how the developed assistive physical keyboard, the Ezi-PAD, and integrated senior friendly applications, can encourage non-smartphone seniors to start using the smartphone and enable senior smartphone users to continue using a smartphone in spite of increasing motoric or visual impairment. A number of seniors with different experience and impairment, aged 64 to 86, were equipped with a smartphone and an Ezi-PAD assembly. After basic training, their use of the smartphone was monitored for up to 2 months. Five out of nine participants used the system for 2 months, and found the Ezi-PAD easy to use. The senior friendly applications gave extra utilitarian value to the phone.
Advances in low power technology have given new possibilities for continuous physiological monito... more Advances in low power technology have given new possibilities for continuous physiological monitoring in several domains such as health care with disease prevention and quality of care services and workers in harsh environment. A miniaturized, multifunctional sensor module that transmits sensor data wirelessly using Bluetooth Smart technology has been developed. The wireless communication link is influenced by factors like antenna orientation, reflections, interference and noise. Test results for signal strength measurements for the wireless transmission in various setups are given and discussed.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) can cause prolonged or permanent injuries if left undetected a... more Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) can cause prolonged or permanent injuries if left undetected and ignored. It is therefore of great interest to lower the threshold for diagnosis of individuals with mTBI injury. We report on the development of a prototype of a portable quantified EEG system intended for inthe-field mTBI diagnostics. The 32-electrode system is fully battery driven, is interfaced with a control unit being part of a telemedicine care system. All electrodes are individually configurable sot that they can be used for wet or dry qEEG electrodes. All electrodes can also be individually configured to allow Trans-Cranial Current Stimulation (tCS) sessions in DC, AC or other current supply modalities. The system has been functionality tested in end-to-end configurations where all control and measurement signals are forwarded between the head device on one side and the user interface and telemedicine system on the other. Tests confirm that the device can acquire and forward EEG data from 32 channels in parallel at target sensitivities up to 1 kHZ sampling frequencies. Tests further confirm that all electrodes can be individually configured for DC or any alternating current waveform up to 1 kHz. Additional device clinical evaluation is planned.
Embedded systems pose challenges such as limited memory and power budget. The list of mandatory f... more Embedded systems pose challenges such as limited memory and power budget. The list of mandatory functionality like connectivity, availability and remote configuration increase the software complexity and requires a more dynamic behaviour. This paper shows how to introduce object orientation to achieve dynamic configuration of processes and communication channels, better usage of RAM and more portable source code. This is implemented by a limited use of C++ without libraries in coexistence with existing C code.
Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve qua... more Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve quality of care, detect exacerbations of disease at an earlier stage and motivate the patient for better self care. This paper reports on a usability study of the ESUMS system that provides continuous measurements of heart rate, activity, upper body posture and skin temperature via a sensor belt and a smartphone as patient terminal. Five CHF patients were included in the trial, all recently discharged from hospital. The nurses experienced continuous heart rate, activity and posture monitoring as useful and objective tools that helped them in their daily assessment of patient health. They also saw the system as an important educational tool to help patients gain insight into their own condition. Three patients liked that they could have a view of their own physiological and activity data, however the smartphones used in the study turned out to be too complicated for the patients to operate. A smartphone is built to be a multi-purpose device, and this may (conceptually and practically) be incompatible with the patients' demands for ease of use.
There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity... more There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity, biomarkers, and vital signs. However, to fully understand the physical and physiological factors of the underlying processes, multiple sensors are often needed in combination with videos. Software for combining, synchronizing, organising and processing sensor data from multiple sensors and videos is therefore essential. Even though multiple open-source solutions like Pyomeca (Martinez et al., 2020) and ALPS (Musmann et al., 2020) exist, existing open source software solutions are limited. None provide the possibility to combine sensor data and videos, few provide tools for synchronising sensors, and none provide tools for synchronising sensors with videos. Furthermore, many solutions rely on cloud storage, which is often unacceptable in biomedical research. There also exist solutions which are not limited in functionality and solve many of the same problems as ARE, such as SensiML Analytics Toolkit (SensiML, cited Jan 2022) and Pasco Capstone Software (scientific, cited Jan 2022), but these are not open source. To meet these limitations, we have developed the AutoActive Research Environment (ARE). The idea of ARE is to create a generic open source methodological framework, especially but not exlusively for the biomedical and sport domains, supporting a wide range of sensors and tools that aid the development, optimization, and evaluation of algorithms.
Exploitation of super-critical water from deep geothermal resources can potentially give a 5-10 f... more Exploitation of super-critical water from deep geothermal resources can potentially give a 5-10 fold increase in the power output per well. Such an improvement represents a significant reduction in investment costs for deep geothermal energy projects, thus improving their competitiveness. The ongoing European Horizon2020 DESCRAMBLE (Drilling in dEep, Super-CRitical AMBients of continental Europe) project will demonstrate the drilling of a deep geothermal well with super-critical conditions (>374°C, >220 bar) by extending an existing well to a depth of around 3.5km. The drilling operation is depending on verification of the bottom hole pressure and temperature where state-of-the-art electronic logging tools cannot operate reliably. SINTEF has developed a novel pressure and temperature logging tool for this extreme environment. The target specification for the tool is 8 hours logging of temperature and pressure at 450°C and 450 bar. In this work, we describe the tool requirements and discuss the design choices made with emphasis on the electronics platform and limitations imposed by the available battery technology, as well as the casing and heat shielding. Test results of the tool are presented, including test data from a field-test in a 250°C geothermal well in Larderello, Italy.acceptedVersio
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a com... more ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a component in an ambulatory system for health monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The device measures heart rate, skin temperature, activity level and posture on the user’s chest. The wearable device has been run through a set of verification tests and the accuracy has been validated in controlled environment on 12 healthy volunteers. A long term user pilot with 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses was performed to test the whole system. The conclusion from the performed tests is that the developed wearable multisensor monitoring device is reliable, accurate, easy to use and fit for the purpose.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2014
Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve qua... more Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve quality of care, detect exacerbations of disease at an earlier stage and motivate the patient for better self care. This paper reports on a usability study of the ESUMS system that provides continuous measurements of heart rate, activity, upper body posture and skin temperature via a sensor belt and a smartphone as patient terminal. Five CHF patients were included in the trial, all recently discharged from hospital. The nurses experienced continuous heart rate, activity and posture monitoring as useful and objective tools that helped them in their daily assessment of patient health. They also saw the system as an important educational tool to help patients gain insight into their own condition. Three patients liked that they could have a view of their own physiological and activity data, however the smartphones used in the study turned out to be too complicated for the patients to operate. ...
IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), 2014
ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a com... more ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a component in an ambulatory system for health monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The device measures heart rate, skin temperature, activity level and posture on the user’s chest. The wearable device has been run through a set of verification tests and the accuracy has been validated in controlled environment on 12 healthy volunteers. A long term user pilot with 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses was performed to test the whole system. The conclusion from the performed tests is that the developed wearable multisensor monitoring device is reliable, accurate, easy to use and fit for the purpose.
2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2013
The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population... more The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population trend, the increase in life-style related disease prevalence, as well as the increased treatment capabilities with associated general expectation all add pressure. The use of ambient healthcare technologies can alleviate the situation by enabling time and cost-efficient monitoring and follow-up of patients discharged from hospital care. We report on an ambulatory system developed for monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The system consists of a wearable multisensor monitoring device; a mobile phone with client application aggregating the data collected; a service-oriented-architecture based server solution; and a PC application facilitating patient follow-up by their health professional carers. The system has been tested and verified for accuracy in controlled environment trials on healthy volunteers, and also been usability tested by 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses. This investigation indicated that patients were able to use the system, and that nurses got an improved basis for patient follow-up.
There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity... more There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity, biomarkers, and vital signs. However, to fully understand the physical and physiological factors of the underlying processes, multiple sensors are often needed in combination with videos. Software for combining, synchronizing, organising and processing sensor data from multiple sensors and videos is therefore essential. Even though multiple open-source solutions like Pyomeca (Martinez et al., 2020) and ALPS (Musmann et al., 2020) exist, existing open source software solutions are limited. None provide the possibility to combine sensor data and videos, few provide tools for synchronising sensors, and none provide tools for synchronising sensors with videos. Furthermore, many solutions rely on cloud storage, which is often unacceptable in biomedical research. There also exist solutions which are not limited in functionality and solve many of the same problems as ARE, such as SensiML Analytics Toolkit (SensiML, cited Jan 2022) and Pasco Capstone Software (scientific, cited Jan 2022), but these are not open source. To meet these limitations, we have developed the AutoActive Research Environment (ARE). The idea of ARE is to create a generic open source methodological framework, especially but not exlusively for the biomedical and sport domains, supporting a wide range of sensors and tools that aid the development, optimization, and evaluation of algorithms.
Synchronization of time is essential for correlation of sensor data. For body area network the se... more Synchronization of time is essential for correlation of sensor data. For body area network the sensors are distributed over multiple sensor nodes located on different parts of the body. When collecting sensor data using wireless sensor networks, the delay variation can be up to 1000 milliseconds. Physiological sensors, like ECG, accelerometer and gyroscopes, require a timing accuracy in the millisecond range. This paper describes a generic method to provide synchronized timestamps. The method is tested in a Wireless sensor network using Bluetooth and Bluetooth Smart sensor nodes. Results show that the method is usable for correlating sensor data with 50ms sample rate.
The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population... more The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population trend, the increase in life-style related disease prevalence, as well as the increased treatment capabilities with associated general expectation all add pressure. The use of ambient healthcare technologies can alleviate the situation by enabling time and cost-efficient monitoring and follow-up of patients discharged from hospital care. We report on an ambulatory system developed for monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The system consists of a wearable multisensor monitoring device; a mobile phone with client application aggregating the data collected; a service-oriented-architecture based server solution; and a PC application facilitating patient follow-up by their health professional carers. The system has been tested and verified for accuracy in controlled environment trials on healthy volunteers, and also been usability tested by 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses. This investigation indicated that patients were able to use the system, and that nurses got an improved basis for patient follow-up.
The aim of the user study was to evaluate how the developed assistive physical keyboard, the Ezi-... more The aim of the user study was to evaluate how the developed assistive physical keyboard, the Ezi-PAD, and integrated senior friendly applications, can encourage non-smartphone seniors to start using the smartphone and enable senior smartphone users to continue using a smartphone in spite of increasing motoric or visual impairment. A number of seniors with different experience and impairment, aged 64 to 86, were equipped with a smartphone and an Ezi-PAD assembly. After basic training, their use of the smartphone was monitored for up to 2 months. Five out of nine participants used the system for 2 months, and found the Ezi-PAD easy to use. The senior friendly applications gave extra utilitarian value to the phone.
Advances in low power technology have given new possibilities for continuous physiological monito... more Advances in low power technology have given new possibilities for continuous physiological monitoring in several domains such as health care with disease prevention and quality of care services and workers in harsh environment. A miniaturized, multifunctional sensor module that transmits sensor data wirelessly using Bluetooth Smart technology has been developed. The wireless communication link is influenced by factors like antenna orientation, reflections, interference and noise. Test results for signal strength measurements for the wireless transmission in various setups are given and discussed.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) can cause prolonged or permanent injuries if left undetected a... more Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) can cause prolonged or permanent injuries if left undetected and ignored. It is therefore of great interest to lower the threshold for diagnosis of individuals with mTBI injury. We report on the development of a prototype of a portable quantified EEG system intended for inthe-field mTBI diagnostics. The 32-electrode system is fully battery driven, is interfaced with a control unit being part of a telemedicine care system. All electrodes are individually configurable sot that they can be used for wet or dry qEEG electrodes. All electrodes can also be individually configured to allow Trans-Cranial Current Stimulation (tCS) sessions in DC, AC or other current supply modalities. The system has been functionality tested in end-to-end configurations where all control and measurement signals are forwarded between the head device on one side and the user interface and telemedicine system on the other. Tests confirm that the device can acquire and forward EEG data from 32 channels in parallel at target sensitivities up to 1 kHZ sampling frequencies. Tests further confirm that all electrodes can be individually configured for DC or any alternating current waveform up to 1 kHz. Additional device clinical evaluation is planned.
Embedded systems pose challenges such as limited memory and power budget. The list of mandatory f... more Embedded systems pose challenges such as limited memory and power budget. The list of mandatory functionality like connectivity, availability and remote configuration increase the software complexity and requires a more dynamic behaviour. This paper shows how to introduce object orientation to achieve dynamic configuration of processes and communication channels, better usage of RAM and more portable source code. This is implemented by a limited use of C++ without libraries in coexistence with existing C code.
Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve qua... more Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve quality of care, detect exacerbations of disease at an earlier stage and motivate the patient for better self care. This paper reports on a usability study of the ESUMS system that provides continuous measurements of heart rate, activity, upper body posture and skin temperature via a sensor belt and a smartphone as patient terminal. Five CHF patients were included in the trial, all recently discharged from hospital. The nurses experienced continuous heart rate, activity and posture monitoring as useful and objective tools that helped them in their daily assessment of patient health. They also saw the system as an important educational tool to help patients gain insight into their own condition. Three patients liked that they could have a view of their own physiological and activity data, however the smartphones used in the study turned out to be too complicated for the patients to operate. A smartphone is built to be a multi-purpose device, and this may (conceptually and practically) be incompatible with the patients' demands for ease of use.
There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity... more There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity, biomarkers, and vital signs. However, to fully understand the physical and physiological factors of the underlying processes, multiple sensors are often needed in combination with videos. Software for combining, synchronizing, organising and processing sensor data from multiple sensors and videos is therefore essential. Even though multiple open-source solutions like Pyomeca (Martinez et al., 2020) and ALPS (Musmann et al., 2020) exist, existing open source software solutions are limited. None provide the possibility to combine sensor data and videos, few provide tools for synchronising sensors, and none provide tools for synchronising sensors with videos. Furthermore, many solutions rely on cloud storage, which is often unacceptable in biomedical research. There also exist solutions which are not limited in functionality and solve many of the same problems as ARE, such as SensiML Analytics Toolkit (SensiML, cited Jan 2022) and Pasco Capstone Software (scientific, cited Jan 2022), but these are not open source. To meet these limitations, we have developed the AutoActive Research Environment (ARE). The idea of ARE is to create a generic open source methodological framework, especially but not exlusively for the biomedical and sport domains, supporting a wide range of sensors and tools that aid the development, optimization, and evaluation of algorithms.
Exploitation of super-critical water from deep geothermal resources can potentially give a 5-10 f... more Exploitation of super-critical water from deep geothermal resources can potentially give a 5-10 fold increase in the power output per well. Such an improvement represents a significant reduction in investment costs for deep geothermal energy projects, thus improving their competitiveness. The ongoing European Horizon2020 DESCRAMBLE (Drilling in dEep, Super-CRitical AMBients of continental Europe) project will demonstrate the drilling of a deep geothermal well with super-critical conditions (>374°C, >220 bar) by extending an existing well to a depth of around 3.5km. The drilling operation is depending on verification of the bottom hole pressure and temperature where state-of-the-art electronic logging tools cannot operate reliably. SINTEF has developed a novel pressure and temperature logging tool for this extreme environment. The target specification for the tool is 8 hours logging of temperature and pressure at 450°C and 450 bar. In this work, we describe the tool requirements and discuss the design choices made with emphasis on the electronics platform and limitations imposed by the available battery technology, as well as the casing and heat shielding. Test results of the tool are presented, including test data from a field-test in a 250°C geothermal well in Larderello, Italy.acceptedVersio
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a com... more ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a component in an ambulatory system for health monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The device measures heart rate, skin temperature, activity level and posture on the user’s chest. The wearable device has been run through a set of verification tests and the accuracy has been validated in controlled environment on 12 healthy volunteers. A long term user pilot with 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses was performed to test the whole system. The conclusion from the performed tests is that the developed wearable multisensor monitoring device is reliable, accurate, easy to use and fit for the purpose.
Studies in health technology and informatics, 2014
Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve qua... more Sensor-based monitoring of congestive heart-failure (CHF) patients living at home can improve quality of care, detect exacerbations of disease at an earlier stage and motivate the patient for better self care. This paper reports on a usability study of the ESUMS system that provides continuous measurements of heart rate, activity, upper body posture and skin temperature via a sensor belt and a smartphone as patient terminal. Five CHF patients were included in the trial, all recently discharged from hospital. The nurses experienced continuous heart rate, activity and posture monitoring as useful and objective tools that helped them in their daily assessment of patient health. They also saw the system as an important educational tool to help patients gain insight into their own condition. Three patients liked that they could have a view of their own physiological and activity data, however the smartphones used in the study turned out to be too complicated for the patients to operate. ...
IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), 2014
ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a com... more ABSTRACT This paper reports on the development and testing of a wearable device intended as a component in an ambulatory system for health monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The device measures heart rate, skin temperature, activity level and posture on the user’s chest. The wearable device has been run through a set of verification tests and the accuracy has been validated in controlled environment on 12 healthy volunteers. A long term user pilot with 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses was performed to test the whole system. The conclusion from the performed tests is that the developed wearable multisensor monitoring device is reliable, accurate, easy to use and fit for the purpose.
2013 35th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2013
The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population... more The pressure on the healthcare services is building up for several reasons. The ageing population trend, the increase in life-style related disease prevalence, as well as the increased treatment capabilities with associated general expectation all add pressure. The use of ambient healthcare technologies can alleviate the situation by enabling time and cost-efficient monitoring and follow-up of patients discharged from hospital care. We report on an ambulatory system developed for monitoring of physical rehabilitation patients. The system consists of a wearable multisensor monitoring device; a mobile phone with client application aggregating the data collected; a service-oriented-architecture based server solution; and a PC application facilitating patient follow-up by their health professional carers. The system has been tested and verified for accuracy in controlled environment trials on healthy volunteers, and also been usability tested by 5 congestive heart failure patients and their nurses. This investigation indicated that patients were able to use the system, and that nurses got an improved basis for patient follow-up.
There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity... more There is an ever-growing variety of biomedical sensors and wearables that aim to monitor activity, biomarkers, and vital signs. However, to fully understand the physical and physiological factors of the underlying processes, multiple sensors are often needed in combination with videos. Software for combining, synchronizing, organising and processing sensor data from multiple sensors and videos is therefore essential. Even though multiple open-source solutions like Pyomeca (Martinez et al., 2020) and ALPS (Musmann et al., 2020) exist, existing open source software solutions are limited. None provide the possibility to combine sensor data and videos, few provide tools for synchronising sensors, and none provide tools for synchronising sensors with videos. Furthermore, many solutions rely on cloud storage, which is often unacceptable in biomedical research. There also exist solutions which are not limited in functionality and solve many of the same problems as ARE, such as SensiML Analytics Toolkit (SensiML, cited Jan 2022) and Pasco Capstone Software (scientific, cited Jan 2022), but these are not open source. To meet these limitations, we have developed the AutoActive Research Environment (ARE). The idea of ARE is to create a generic open source methodological framework, especially but not exlusively for the biomedical and sport domains, supporting a wide range of sensors and tools that aid the development, optimization, and evaluation of algorithms.
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