CSAIL Event Calendar: Previous Series

E-Textiles to Wearable Wireless Sensor Networks and Beyond

Speaker: Edward Grant , Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (CRIM), North Carolina Stata University
Date: May 15 2008
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: 32-D463 (Stata Center - Star Conference Room)
Host: Daniela Rus, MIT CSAIL

Personalized long-term healthcare monitoring will improve medicine’s capabilities for diagnosing and correctly treating diseases at an early stage. This presentation details how CRIM research progressed towards producing wearable wireless sensor networks for health monitoring. Historically, CRIM research into wearable computing began with an e-textile acoustic array project for DARPA. Limitations in producing robust and reliable conducive lines, and data lines, with traditional textile substrates led to a move to using nonwoven substrates for fabricating wearable electronic textile. Studies were conducted into screen- printing conductive inks directly onto nonwoven substrates, to produce circuits and embedded systems. This approach applied polymer thick film (PTF) directly onto compliant, flexible, nonwoven substrates. Various PTF conductive inks were characterized and transmission lines were printed. Testing showed that the performance metrics related to producing reliable circuits is impacted by both the ink viscosity and the contact angle of the ink on the surface of the nonwoven structure, since these two parameters dictate the manner in which the ink distributes onto and into the substrate. Based on the progress made with screen-printing and nonwoven substrates the CRIM made the move towards producing clothing that is suitable for long term health monitoring. The current state-of-the-art in CRIM textile-based electronic sensors for monitoring and measuring healthcare parameters, includes: (1) two types of ECG active electrodes, (2) two types of capacitance sensors for respiration monitoring, and (3) research that designed and integrated a new modular wireless sensor node (MWSN) system into several health monitoring clothing applications. The applications involved integrating the MWSN into a custom designed ECG belt, a capacitive sensor respiration belt and an activity patch. Results obtained from these applications demonstrate that the MWSN is capable of interfacing with a diverse selection of health monitoring sensors while maintaining signal fidelity in the captured data.

Dr. Edward Grant is the Director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (CRIM) at North Carolina State University (NC State). He is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State, a Professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering for UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State, and a Visiting Professor in the Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre, Loughborough University of Technology, UK. He earned a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Dundee College of Technology (now University of Abertay Dundee) in 1969; Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering (Fluid Power Control) from the University of Sheffield in 1972; and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde, 2000. Dr. Grant is a Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (F.I.Mech.E.), and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (S.M.I.E.E.E.). From 1992-1994 Dr. Grant served as a committee member of the I.Mech.E. Control Technical Activities Committee of the Machine Systems Control and Computing Group, from 1994-1996 he served on the Computing and Data Communications Committee. From 1989 – 1995 Dr. Grant served as Vice-Chairman of the I.E.E.E. Control Systems Society’s Technical Committee on Intelligent Control. In 1992 he was General Chairman of the International Symposium on Intelligent Control. From 1993-1997 Dr. Grant was the Founding Chairman of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland Chapter of the I.E.E.E. Robotics and Automation Society, from 1997-1999 he was Chairman. From 1993-1997 he served on the Long-Range Planning Committee and on the International Committee of the I.E.E.E. Robotics and Automation Society. In 2007 Dr. Grant served as General Chair of the I.E.E.E./RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS’07). Dr. Grant is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Dr. Grant’s research activities are in the areas of evolutionary control applied to autonomous mobile robot colonies, machine learning applied in control systems, rehabilitation engineering and human movement science, distributed wireless sensor systems, wireless electronic textiles, automated cell micro-actuation and micro-injection, brain-computer interfaces, ENT robot surgery.

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