Big Brother in SEAT Environment

Type: Semester Thesis
Student: Christian Dobler, René Winkler
Advisor: Johannes Schumm, Urs Egger
Project: SEAT

This semester thesis addresses the issues concerning the design and the development of a prototype skin temperature sensor device and a Data Acquisition Board (DAB) capable of recording, handling and forwarding audio signals.

The project is part of the European project SEAT which deals with the development of a new type of seat for long-term flights. One part of this project is the appraisal of the well-being of the passenger. This raises the need of reliable information about the current activity and condition of the passenger. The semester thesis is divided into two subprojects:

1) Skin Temperature Measurement

The passenger's skin temperature is correlated with his comfort and state of health. Emotions like stress or fear of flying are expressed in a change of skin temperature and thus it forms a reliable indicator of passenger's condition.

The skin temperature measurement was realized by an integrated circuit sensor assuring high resolution.

2) Data Acquisition Board (DAB)

The role of the Data Acquisition Board (DAB) is to acquire environmental data in such a way that it can be synchronized with the data from other sensors. The two main tasks of the DAB are the recording of sound and air temperature & humidity. Sound is a reliable source for activity recognition, whereas the data from the air temperature & humidity sensor will be used as a reference value for the data recorded by the physiological board.

This DAB is based on a 16-bit dsPIC. Besides recording sound it listens and processes data packets from the Physio-Board and packages this data together with its own recorded data. Then it dispatches this new packet to the PC where the data is processed and visualized by MATLAB.