Home

Recently…

• We decided, based on a set of tests we ran, that an all-Bluetooth solution for the Wockets may be viable, despite the high power consumption of the Bluetooth radios. The competing idea was to use a low-power protocol to transmit from the limb sensors to an intermediate device that then communicated with the mobile phone via Bluetooth. Assuming we can eke out enough life from a battery configuration that meets our usability constraints, the Bluetooth-only solution may be less costly and more robust. We have work do to on this front and will be looking for your feedback. See the wiki to discsuss!
• We determined that we could write phone software to reliably stay connected (and auto reconnect) with multiple Bluetooth-based accelerometers. We were concerned about this, given our past Bluetooth experience and talking with others who tried to do this, but our prototype seems to be working well at this point, at least on the HTC Windows Mobile phones we are using for testing.
• We built small prototype Bluetooth-only accelerometer boards (designed by MIT undergraduate Ranbel Sun) that we have been using for testing the robustness of the phone software. These relatively simple, inexpensive boards leave a lot of room for improvement, but they are a terrific starting point and have enabled us to gather some targeted, helpful feedback about how to quickly ramp up to a version 2. See the wiki for more info.
• We ported software for training and running decision trees for physical activity recognition to Windows Mobile phones. We now have a prototype showing proof of concept that we can gather data, train models, and then run real-time recognition all on the phone using Bluetooth sensors.
• We wrote additional phone software for gathering points of interest from phone GPS data, HR data from commercial Bluetooth HR monitors, and self-report data from questionnaires … all of which may prove useful for testing the validity of the Wockets system down the road.
• We have continued to add information about the sensors to this website and the Wockets Wiki. This is where we put information related to the design of the Wockets, and where you can participate..