Picture Phoning [via Engadget] says Walkers have swallowed RFID pills for science:
Researchers at Radboud University in The Netherlands were able to monitor the body temperature of participants at the world’s largest marching event using RFID technology. Volunteer participants in the annual Four Days Marches of Nijmegen swallowed an RFID-based temperature sensor that measured their internal temperature and helped researchers identify potential health issues.
The RFID-based temperature sensor was provided by Florida-based HQ Inc. The company’s 262 kHz CorTemp sensor has been used by a number of other organizations, including the National Football League (NFL), to track the core body temperature of athletes. reports.
“Based on their height, weight and age, the system was able to alert the volunteer if their core body temperature had reached a dangerous level,” says Martijn Bakkers, branch manager of healthcare at Progress Software.
The temperatures of ten volunteers were transmitted every ten seconds from the RFID “pill” to a receiving device in the volunteer’s backpack. That data was then transmitted via Bluetooth to a GPS-enabled mobile phone to the operations center at Radboud.
In related news, the “stress sensor vest” registers the electrical excitation of the wearer’s muscles at any given time and determines the level of physical stress. The vest has sensors woven into the fabric that register the electrical excitation of the muscle fibers.
The idea of the sensor vest originated with biomedical scientists at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, says Gizmag. Until then, they had affixed electrodes directly to their test subjects’ chests. But this itself induced stress, resulting in very little useful information. The new vest is designed to ensure a more relaxed test environment.
”The most important requirement for everyday use is a robust electronic system,” says Torsten Linz of the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin, the partner responsible for the “packaging”.
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