University of Limerick

The Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick has a long and well established tradition in high quality teaching and research in the area of biomedical engineering. Together with the University of Limerick’s Graduate medical school and the Department of Physiotherapy, several projects are, and have been conducted investigating human activity. In these projects the University of Limerick was responsible for the development of fall and mobility algorithms and the hardware to extract data from human movement and relay these wirelessly to a base station (pc or mobile phone). Additionally, University of Limerick has performed the important role of liaising between technical partners, medical partners and end-users in several clinical trials. University of Limerick has advanced laboratories and development facilities for wireless data communication research. These facilities include an Azimuth isolation chamber, which is of great value for deterministic tests with wireless links. Various software licenses and programming environments are available for the programming of wireless devices. Furthermore, University of Limerick has access to a camera based, six degrees of freedom mobility monitoring system, which will be used as a golden standard for the human activity algorithms to be implemented.

Within the ICT4Depression project, the University of Limerick’s main contribution is in the area of activity sensors, sensor integration and wireless communication. The will University of Limerick’ mobilise 2 FTE engineers focussing on human activity monitoring algorithms, (embedded) data processing, sensor data gathering from multiple sensors consecutively and efficient data transmission and storage.

The University of Limerick will leverage its experience from previous projects (such as the FP6 project CAALYX) to realise measurement of human activity using a mobile phone and to use the mobile phone to collect and relay information from other sensors. The University has the necessary expertise, hardware and software licenses and experimental facilities to undertake this task successfully.