Technology Platform
Software
BioMOBIUS Platform
The BioMOBIUS platform is a rapid biosignal application development platform, which can create robust applications for large scale deployment. It supports all the software needs of the TTP (TRIL Technology Platform) and thus all of the TRIL Centre clinical strands, allowing the creation of complex biosignal applications for older people quickly and reliably.
Older persons, Therapists, Clinicians, Bioengineers and Software Development Engineers should all interact with the platform with minimal training, each user having access to different functional detail.
It is hoped there will be significant overlap in the defined roles, but these roles will form the basis for abstracting technically complex functionality into higher level blocks.
The BioMOBIUS Platform is based on the EyesWeb system, which can be downloaded from their website at www.eyesweb.org
GOALS
One of the core goals of this platform is to reduce replication in development effort on multiple biosignal projects. If say a camera interface is developed, it will be encapsulated in a black box, or block, for reuse on other projects. This encapsulation paradigm can be taken further to allow a string of blocks be encapsulated in a higher level block for less technical users. For example a camera block, a feature extraction block and some processing blocks may be encapsulated in a face detection block, which a clinician might use to build a gesture analysis system.
Graphical Development Environment
A second core goal of the project is that the platform provides a straightforward interface to the platform for all users. Precedents have been set for this type of platform, they generally take the form of Drag and Drop Development Environments, sometimes called Graphical Development Environments (GDE’s). Functional blocks are selected from a palette of tools and connected on a drawing area to describe data flow through a system or application. This tool while being very useful for rapid development of complex systems adds significant processor overhead during execution. The BioMOBIUS platform, therefore, has an efficient runtime engine that does not require the overhead of the GDE. This real-time engine undertakes functions including, signal acquisition, signal processing, stimulus presentation, display of visual feedback.
Figure 1 – BioMOBIUS Platform Software Architecture by User interaction, different users have access to different levels of technical detail. Processing is executed by a kernel, which can be separated from the graphical development environment during runtime, in which case it is managed by a lightweight GUI.
BioMOBIUS GUI Designer Tool
For installations of EMOBIUS applications, which do not require graphical development environment, the user of the system still has control of the execution, with a lightweight User Interface. This interface controls functions such as:
- Gathering user input
- starting and stopping acquisition of data
- set up and Configuration of applications
- Graphical output of data
- directing this data to log files
- checking all devices are connected
Figure 2 – BioMOBIUS GUI designer
This control is managed by a graphical user interface (figure 2), communicating directly with the runtime platform via TCP/IP to allow remote connection if necessary. The BioMOBIUS platform includes an interface for building this lightweight GUI. This GUI development environment allows the addition of standard windows controls such as buttons, text input boxes, radio buttons, etc familiar to PC users. Each control added to the GUI can be mapped to a pin on a functional block within the GDE to allow control of the application from the GUI.
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