maphera: Plug and Research

Collecting high-quality physiological data is fundamental to applied research and the broader field of personalized healthcare. Quality data – such as ECG, pulse, EEG, and EMG – is also essential for training AI algorithms. A key factor in obtaining meaningful and accurate multimodal measurements is ensuring subject mobility and data consistency. This is where maphera ^® steps in.

Fraunhofer maphera^® is a mobile and extendible sensor platform. Unlike traditional methods of multimodal data collection, such as stationary setups and parallel commercial standalone systems, maphera^® enables exceptional subject mobility while maintaining superior physiological signal quality and data consistency.

In case of stationary systems,  wiring is required for sensor integration. This limits mobility and, thus, the environments in which data can be acquired. Parallel standalone systems offer good mobility but suffer from limited data quality when fusing data from different non-compatible systems. Fraunhofer maphera^® overcomes both limitations with its wireless network and native sensor integration.

Plug & research: Modular sensor configurations

The maphera^® platform serves as a location-independent and scientific research platform, providing a flexible plug and research solution. Users can access our growing inventory of ready-to-use wearables. The modular nature of maphera^® allows us to quickly tailor maphera^® for specific applications. Examples of these are pulse sensors integrated into headbands, shirts with an integrated ECG, and various other physiological sensors. All these modalities are synchronized during recordings with an accuracy well below 50 µs.

If new sensors are required, we can leverage our light-weight sensor interface to natively integrate custom sensors into maphera^® and wearables as needed.

The generic network of maphera^® takes care of wireless communication and data integrity, enabling users to do sports or to continue their everyday life while collecting authentic data. At the same time, the generic network ensures that any recorded data is synchronized and available for analysis in high quality. The full resolution data will be stored locally but can also be streamed out for real time insights.

Fast prototyping and application-specific integration

The generic network has a lightweight sensor interface on one end. The interface is used to integrate new and customer specific sensors. This reduces time spent on development drastically as we can leverage the generic network as it is. This makes maphera^® ideal for fast prototyping, saves time, and lowers costs.

For control and visualization, we have implemented a ready-to-be-used user interface. This improves maphera^®’s capabilities for fast prototyping as no additional development time is needed to get started. However, as most applications have dedicated requirements for the user interface, we have standardized the access to the generic network with an API. This means after initial testing to verify the use case, we can tailor the user interface to the exact environment for a perfect fit.

maphera^® in a nutshell

We have streamlined our years of scientific experience in physiological sensing to create maphera^®. With maphera^®, we offer users a mobile sensor platform with wireless and native sensor integration. maphera^® is designed from the ground up to enable fast prototyping, so our customers can build upon maphera^® to shorten their development cycles and evaluate their use cases more quickly.

Clock Drifts and Synchronization Series

Read the kickoff to our Clock Drifts and Synchronization Series. In this series, we share insights regarding clock drifts and synchronization from the development of our highly synchronized wireless sensor network maphera^®.

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