ABR: Collaborative research: Computational Jewelry for Mobile Health

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

Mobile health (mHealth) technology promises to improve quality of life, improve individual and public health, and reduce healthcare costs. Although mHealth devices and applications are proliferating, challenges remain. With a focus on usability, manageability, interoperability, availability, security, and privacy, the Amulet project has worked to engineer the tools for, and lay the scientific foundation of, secure wearable mHealth by developing a general framework for body-area pervasive computing, centered around health-monitoring and health-management applications. The Amulet team has built a prototype computational jewelry platform: an electronic bracelet and a software framework that enables developers to create (and users to easily use) safe, secure, and efficient mHealth applications that fit seamlessly into everyday life. This accomplishment-based renewal extends this work?refining and extending the Amulet platform?s functionality, evaluating its performance and usability in larger-scale studies, and transitioning the technology into an open and extensible tool for the research and healthcare communities. The investigators expect Amulet will be a platform for a wide range of mHealth applications, and this project evaluates this potential in a concrete setting in cooperation with the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth College. This project explores use of the Amulet platform in new applications, using new wearable sensors and new kinds of user interactions. This exploration includes fielding Amulet prototypes to study stress and other behavioral health metrics, and refining the Amulet hardware and software in response to user feedback, in order to prepare the platform for a successful public release to the research community. The Amulet will open exciting new opportunities as it becomes available to both technology and health-science researchers as they explore the burgeoning field of wearable technology.