Presented at the Global Health and Performance Summit, Columbus, OH (May 2016)

Custom applications used to collect data from sensor devices like EEG, EMG, and accelerometers are expensive and time consuming to develop. Charles River Analytics is taking advantage of the Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) framework and Apache’s open source message broker, ActiveMQ, to develop a flexible, plug-and-play software platform that takes care of the complexities associated with connecting to and retrieving data from sensor devices, giving Charles River Analytics the ability to spend more time analyzing and interpreting data and less time figuring out how to collect it. The platform has three core components: (1) an OSVR server which uses a sensor’s API/SDK to bind to the sensor; (2) an OSVR client that reads data from sensors and sends it to the message broker; and (3) the message broker which is a simple data queueing service. The broker implements an extensive API that enables any application build on top of this system to easily subscribe to data feeds. This API can be accessed using the transmission control protocol (TCP) or the Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol (STOMP), both of which are implemented in most programming languages. The OSVR server requires a driver to be written for each hardware device to which OSVR binds. However, once written, the driver can be reused for any project requiring use of the same sensor.

This material is partially based on work supported by the United States Air Force under Contract No. FA8650-15-C-6628. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force.