BOS: Software Principles & Techniques for a Body-centric OS

The Division of Networked Embedded Systems are involved in this research project.

The Body-centric Operating System (BOS) is a cross-platform, modular, and energy-efficient software toolkit for body computing applications.

Body computing seeks to advance the study of human bodies using wearable technology, implanted devices, and brain-machine interfaces, combined with computing resources at the edge and cloud. BOS addresses the key challenge of facilitating the development tasks in medical sciences and smart health, allowing application developers to focus on high-level goals rather than low-level issues.

Our research methodology is three-pronged:

(i) we design programming abstractions that mask the diverse nature of resource-constrained devices and their interconnections;

(ii) we develop advanced body-computing functionality for energy-efficient processing of tactile and tremor signals, and software abstractions for brain-machine interfaces; and

(iii) we create a flexible software stack to handle different network requirements, for example, low and high data rates, with resource-constrained devices.

Our research culminates in a series of demonstrators used to evaluate the system performance in real-world conditions. We target deep brain stimulation, a neurosurgical procedure that uses electrical stimulation to treat movement disorders associated with diseases such as Parkinson’s. The demonstrators hence double as a point of integration and as a contribution to health and wellbeing of pivotal societal importance.

More information about the project on the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research website