SENSATION
Description
“Advanced Sensor Development for Attention, Stress, Vigilance & Sleep/Wakefulness Monitoring” (SENSATION) is an integrated project of the VI EU R&D Framework Programme included in the Strategic Objective Micro & Nano Sensors of the IST Thematic Priority. The project has a planned duration of four years and was set in motion on January 1 2004.
Its objective is to study the sleeping state and its relations with the conscious state as well as with stress and other emotions in order to develop technologies for safety, health and comfort. SENSATION therefore aims to promote people’s health, safety and quality of life as well as protecting the environment by reducing the number of accidents associated with sleep loss and fatigue.
The project consists essentially of research into micro and nano sensor technology for use in monitoring, detecting and predicting human physiological reactions associated with wakefulness, fatigue and stress for all types of persons at different times and places. Different states of the human brain will be monitored by 17 microsensors and two nanosensors (cerebral activity sensors, bracelets, eye-movement sensors, motility, etc.) integrated into BAN, LAN and WAN wireless networks.
The SENSATION R&D vision is structured around four areas:
- Physiology: Investigation and definition of states of sleep and wakefulness and their relationships and setting objectives for biological measurements.
- Biosensors: development of new ubiquitous biosensors including support and connectivity technologies.
- Computation: Developing and implementing signal processing and intelligent computational algorithms concerned with sleep, stress, attention and fatigue.
- Medical and industrial applications: Application of biosensors and computation to medical purposes and critical industrial processes.
This project is being carried out by a consortium of 40 international members including the Instituto de Transporte Heleno, Fraunhofer and VTT, Siemens VDO Automotive, DaimlerChrysler AG and Atmel. Universities taking part are the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Barcelona and Surrey, as well as ITACA-TSB.
TSB participates, fundamentally, in the development of a communications platform to connect the sensors developed with the applications in which they will be used. This platform has three levels: Body Area Network (BAN) for wireless reception of all data acquired by the sensors for further wireless transmission to the other levels, composed of the Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN).
