Thanks to all at Real Time technologies, especially Paddy, Kieran and William and for a very informative day with Shimmer and Wireless technologies

Here is a summary of the meeting:

Paddy White, CEO of Real Time, described the colourful history of Real Time Technologies and the Dundalk connection.

Frank Ryan, CEO of Enterprise Ireland outlined EIs current strategy and the needs for alliances between academia and indigenous industry. The game now is all about the rapid development of revenue generating products.

Dr Declan Bogan of BioBusiness presented his excellent Connected Health in Ireland report which should help to generate and foster a growing community of Health Informaticians in Ireland.

Prof. Dermot Diamond of Clarity described developments at the Clarity Centre and their strategies for building low cost/high scale sensor devices to open up the wireless sensor market. He agreed with Frank Ryan that we in Ireland need to show successes with the commercialisation of products. He saw opportunities in using utilities monitoring to gather life style information but mentioned the ethical and legislative problems that need to be addressed. He also highlighted the large number of post-docs on short-term contracts who may be lost to the county.

Dr Chris Nugent of Ulster University presented the work of the Smart Environments Research Group. He spoke of the growing need to study user inputs and do large-scale evaluations of sensor devices and networks, a theme picked up by others later in the day. His conclusions on the work that now needed to be done with wireless sensor networks include; early and continual involvement with end-users, decreased complexity of use with added functionality, scalability and management issues now more important, the requirements for the personalisation of service delivery, intelligent environments and long-term, large-scale evaluation.

Dr Michael McGrath of Intel and TRIL discussed the BioMobius platform for wireless application development. Biomobius can be used to build wireless applications using Shimmer. The platform has a short development time and focuses on reuse and hides the complexity away - no more programming in TinyOS! He showed some of their work at TRIL including the validation work they have done on the Shimmer devices and the applications including the Gait Analysis system, an In-home version of gait analysis, a Shimer-based GSR application installed in a cushion to measure a person's levels of alertness, an ambulatory ECH module and an exercise monitoring application. He concluded that Shimmer was a key component of the Biomobius platform.

In a round-table forum the following points were made about the current state of wireless sensor networks in Ireland

• We need to close the research/innovation gap with products that are closer to market
• We need to align with national strategies such as the HSE, government etc.
• We need test-bed facilities on a large scale and we need to demonstrate prototypes on a large scale.
• Clinical input is vital for success
• Champions in the healthcare professions need to be identified in order to gain access to clinical trials.
• An understanding of Health economics is a critical deficit
• The ethical and legal frameworks need to be addressed

Some demonstrations followed:

• TRIL demonstrated the "alertness cushion" and the Gait Analysis Systems.
• Ian from University of Ulster demonstrated his work on wearable textiles.
• Boon Kien Khoo from CIT briefly described the work of the Nimbus Centre for Embedded Systems Research.
• Finally a team from NUI Maynooth showed a project called "Cloud-enabled sensing with Shimmer and Rich Applications". In this application, sponsored by Innovation Vouchers and Shimmer Research, a Shimmer streamed live accelerometer and gyroscope data to an Amazon server in the Cloud. An Android-based cell phone with a Flash player subscribed to the data stream and could view it live.

After a tour of the Real Time technologies factory, the afternoon was devoted to a discussion about the latest developments on the Shimmer platform.

Ben Kuris discussed the hardware and software developments respectively. The latest Shimmer, the Shimmer 2R has 10KB RAM, 48KB Flash memory and runs at up to 8Mhz on a MSP430F1611 CPU. The device uses extremely low power during periods of interactivity. It looks like a Flash data key when docked. It has a new 802.15.4 radio built by RealTime and some new features like a battery voltage monitoring, a power off button and a more robust casing. Next on the agenda will be a Shimmer Light and a Shimmer3. New sensor modules will include a UV exposure module and an enhanced EMG module. Some behavioural modules coming soon will include a foot pressure module.

Steve Ayer discussed the software developments including the FAT file system, a FAT Logger, 6LowPAN support, a host timestamp, CPU refresh, SDHC and SD BSL. The applications now include a Shimmer Display application which will display Shimmer data out of the box. Other applications just developed or on the way include a SixAxisTransmitter, BSL App, Biomobius2, LabView support, Data Reader and further LiveDVD updates. Finally Florin showed the Shimmer Display application and demonstrated a Shimmer internally processing an ECG signal while sampling at 500Hz.