CSEM, European Partners Launch Wear-a-BAN Project

CSEM and its European partners successfully launched in June the EC-funded Wear-a-BAN project. The objectives of this innovative project are to investigate and demonstrate ultra low-power wireless body-area-network technologies for enabling unobtrusive human to machine interfaces into market segments such as smart and interactive textiles, robotics for augmented reality assistance and rehabilitation and natural interfacing devices for video gaming.

Wear-a-BAN will enable major technological breakthroughs that will generate strong societal impact by increasing the comfort, health and security for a wide category of users in the European population.

Communication between man and machine, also known as human-machine-interface (HMI), could become more intuitive or natural by integrating motional and emotional information, parameters which are difficult to express with standard HMI devices. In man-to-man communication, a large part of the information is transmitted naturally through non-verbal communication (body language, intonations, etc).

The kick-off meeting of the Wear-a-BAN project was held on June 23-24 in Limasol, Cyprus and the project was successfully launched with the active participation of the consortium members. The project will last for two years and the consortium consists of leading research organizations, universities, associations of SMEs and SME participants from all over Europe, including the Robotics Society of Finland, Cap Digital Paris Region, Ateval, Playall Management, Ramon Espi S.L., Movea SA, Deltatron Oy, SignalGeneriX Ltd., Voxler, Aitex, CSEM SA, Technical University of Berlin, VTT, CEA-LETI and the coordinator RTD TALOS Ltd.

CSEM has been selected as the technical coordinator of the project and will provide an ultra low-power RF system-on-chip based on its icycom technology, with best in class RF power consumption as well as on-chip digital signal processing.

Wear-a-BAN will contribute to enable EC policies such as eHealth for better healthcare in Europe, i2010 for fostering better inclusion of disabled people through ICT, eLearning for speeding up changes in education and training, and EU Health and Safety at work for enabling safer interaction for machine or robot operators.

Wear-a-BAN will enable major technological breakthroughs in the areas of ultra low-power radio system-on-chips and of textile-oriented system-in-package platforms for miniature wearable antennas, wireless and sensor electronics and digital signal processing, resulting in significantly increasing the competitiveness of the Associations and SMEs participating in the project.

For further information please visit the project website: www.wearaban.eu.