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The Rice Orbit platform consists of an Internet-capable mobile phone and
its wireless body-area peripherals, including sensors and auxiliary user
interfaces. It is intended to be an open-source (both hardware and
software) research platform for mobile and embedded computing.
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Orbit
Sensor |
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The Orbit sensor is a ultra low-power Bluetooth interface for sensing
devices to join the wireless body-area network of a mobile phone. Currently
two versions are used. The educational/ debugging version (Orbit-EDU) is used
for development and Rice Computer Engineering senior design projects; the
mini-version (Orbit-MINI) is used for user and field studies. It provides
standard UART, SPI, and analog data interfaces to obtain sensor data and
general purpose input/output (GPIOs) for proper control, especially power
management, of sensing devices.
The Orbit sensor communicates with a
Bluetooth-capable device through an application-level protocol.
Orbit
Sensor 2.0 with microSD |
Orbit sensor 1.0: Educational and mini versions |
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Orbit-EDU: Open-access educational version
>>More information about the Orbit-EDU |
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Orbit-Watch |
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The Orbit-Watch is a wrist-worn secondary user interface that enables
wireless wrist access to the computing power of the mobile phone. Its user
interface consists of a 2x8 character LCD, a 3-axis accelerometer for motion
sensing, multiple tact buttons (3 actually used), and multiple capacitive touch sensors. It is
based on the design of the Orbit adapter and communicates with the mobile
phone through Bluetooth. More information about its design can be found in
the Rice OrbitWatch 1.0
whitepaper (PDF) (Watch demo
video 7.7MB, released 10/9/06).
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Orbit-Watch 1.0 (based on Orbit Sensor 1.0) |
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Orbit-ECG |
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The Orbit-ECG is a three-lead wearable electrocardiograph sensor based Orbit
Sensor 2.0. It reports data periodically via Bluetooth to a cell phone,
which then relays the data to an Internet server. Orbit-ECG originated from
the senior design project by Team
Tangerine, which won the first place in ECE design project contest 2007.
It was also demonstrated in Mobisys'07. |
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Applications |
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The Orbit platform provides a versatile
platform for exploring pervasive personal applications. We are currently
using it for our project in Mobile
Healthcare with collaborators from the
Texas Medical Center.
Published work that uses Orbit:
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Lin Zhong, Diana El-Daye, Brett Kaufman, Nick Tobaoda, Tamer
Mohamed, and
Michael
Liebschner, "OsteoConduct: Wireless body-area communication
based on bone conduction," in Proc. Int. Conf. Body Area
Networks (BodyNets), June 2007.
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Ahmad Rahmati
and Lin Zhong, "Context for Wireless: Context-sensitive energy-efficient
wireless data transfer," in Proc. ACM/USENIX Int. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys),
June 2007.
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