Smart Wearable Monitors and Understands Complex Human Motion

University of British Columbia researchers have developed a practical way to monitor and interpret human motion, in what may be the missing piece to the puzzle when it comes to wearable technology. What started as research to create an ultra-stretchable sensor, transformed into an inter-disciplinary project that resulted in the advanced wearable device. Tech Briefs spoke with the inventors about the new technology.

Transcript

00:00:01 wearable devices they have been created for different applications mostly for health monitoring lots of application in energy harvesting and also recently for surgical robots that doctors can do remotely the operation in the robot performs in the real operating room what we did we came up with a ultra sensitive stretchable sensor that can be weaved or mounted on a fabric and it can be used

00:00:26 for monitoring the muscle motion when we were trying to build a research one component of the research was to build the sensors and then in order to characterize them and calibrate them we built a fixture to do so and then we collected the data and then we started interpreting it this is an end-to-end sensor development that start everything from building a sensor all the way to

00:00:51 interpreting the research area is a very multidisciplinary interdisciplinary involves Electrical Engineering mechanical engineering nanotechnology how fun exercise as well as a micro electromechanical devices and during the research we got opportunity to work with other faculty members across Canada so it's not just a team here at UBC Okanagan so this research has brought us

00:01:14 lots of opportunities because of its multidisciplinary nature what we have here is a new approach for interpretation there are many different approaches to build sensors but how you can now collect these sensor information and how you can interpret the signals to render that human motion is something that we can call our contribution to the field