This was a while back when I first blogged about this device from Microsoft Research and now it’s out there for purchase, the Vicon Revue. It also relates body measurements at the same time, so we have a couple things going on here. It is not cheap though and priced around $800.00. Battery life is slated at around 24 hours use. 
A Camera to Help Dementia Patients
It also contains a passive infra-red motion detector and a multi-axis accelerometer, which I just posted a related article this morning looking at how they are used to monitor our activity levels.
Accelerometers Begin to Get Smarter – Walk ‘n Play Software Device Information to Be Announced
With the accelerometer, this means we have data to analyze available.
“SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a cameraphone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images. This shows both images and relates body measurements at the same time.”
There’s also some additional information available at the Microsoft Research Page on the capabilities of the device. For some reason this makes me think about drug compliance, is this part of the future there with picture of a patient taking their drugs?
Here’s a bit more from the Microsoft Research page linked above with medical patients and students being the focus:
“We have also worked with the Universities of Nottingham and Bath, the BBC, BT and two small companies, Blast Theory and ScienceScope as part of a project called Participate. The purpose of Participate is to design, develop and test the utility of novel, pervasive, lightweight and wearable technologies that support mass participation in science, education, art and community life. SenseCam has been used by a number of school children as part of this project. In a separate piece of work, SenseCam has been used in the classroom to enable teachers to create a log of their day, supporting various aspects of reflective practice and thereby enabling users of the device to analyse their day afterwards. SenseCam has also been used in an office environment to support studies of how office workers spend their day, and in particular how they manage to work simultaneously on different tasks.”
“We are also collaborating with a number of other researchers around the world to further explore yet more potential usages for SenseCam, including:
- As a recording device for monitoring food intake, helping dieticians see the type, the quantity, and the timing of food a patient is eating.
- As a tool to assess accessibility issues encountered by wheelchair users.
- To coordinate disaster response by recording visual information encountered by those responding to disasters, people preoccupied with providing hands-on help.
- As an automatic diary that doesn’t require expensive, intrusive recording equipment or restrict a user’s activities.
- To monitor physiological data to help patients understand the sequence of events that precedes a period of intense anxiety or anger.
- To monitor lighting conditions in schools and to learn how they affect students. “
Below is a video that shows what a capture time with the camera looks like. There are a couple more at the site to view as well. There’s a case study here on how the camera helped to alleviate memory loss.
All the information can be viewed on a PC. Did I take my medications today, well let me take a look and see (grin). i just hope that I don’t have to show this to some insurance company someday to get approval on medical claim for payment. Did I exercise enough today, it will report on what you did or did not do.
LifeShirt Has Upgrade Coming Out With Bluetooth and Zigbee Wireless – A Shirt that Transmits Health Data
Clinical trials could see some use perhaps with monitoring patients with this item too. Recently I posted about a wireless shirt, well you could add this maybe to the wardrobe required to participate. No doubt down the road Clinical trial reporting functions will accelerate too with devices.
A little funny side note here, just imagine if all members of Congress wore one of these! Wow! Would we be ready to view such information! Well it appears they want all of our data as little tiny consumers out here, well is the sign of things to come? Could be be analyzing in the future how our leaders function? If any of them read this post, I’m sure it would scare the daylights out of them and we could see more announcing retirement (grin). Again, I mention this once again to hopefully educate and bring an awareness around of how bad some folks really need to read up on what’s happening around them so we all understand what technologies are being created and used, and we want to make sure we have privacy and use them wisely and not just for monetary gain. This is brave new area with few laws or rules to protect the potential abuse that could stand to over ride beneficial use if profits are the #1 focus. BD
Remember last year when we told you about the SenseCam, the small, wearable camera that records your whole life? Well, it’s here now.
Originally a Microsoft Research project designed to help those with Alzheimer’s disease, the small camera created by researchers at the Cambridge Lab is worn on a lanyard around the neck and takes photos whenever movement is spotted or a person approaches.
A company called Vicon had licensed the production rights from Microsoft in order to launch the camera as the “Vicon Revue.” And now it’s available for purchase.
According the product’s website, the Revue contains a color VGA resolution sensor (640 x 480 pixels), temperature sensor, light color and intensity sensor, passive infra-red motion detector, multi-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnetometer (compass), battery and flash memory. And it’s fitted with a fish-eye lens to provide a full 130 degree field of view.
SenseCam Arrives! | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10
0 comments :
Post a Comment