Health
KNOWME Wins Body Computing Slam Prize
By Jon Nalick on November 4, 2009 11:04 AM
A team led by associate professor Donna Spruijt-Metz won co-honors with USC Viterbi School of Engineering faculty at the USC Body Computing Slam.
The event was a competition of presentations held the day before the annual USC Body Computing Conference 3.0, which took place in mid-October on the University Park campus.
The award-winning presentation was the KNOWME Network study, which uses wireless, wearable body sensors to measure physiological activity, food intake, stress levels, heart rate and other indicators.
The KNOWME device is to be tailored to the individual and would “ping” the person whenever he or she was sedentary for too long.
Spruijt-Metz, who teaches in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, is the principal investigator on the study, which aims to develop a mobile body area network for minority youth to encourage physical activity and better health.
USC Viterbi faculty members included Urbashi Mitra, Shri Narayanan and Murali Annavaram from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and Gaurav Sukhatme and Nenad Medvidovic from the Department of Computer Science. Also on the team was Giselle Ragusa, who has appointments with USC Viterbi and the USC Rossier School of Education.
At the Body Computing Slam, teams presented projects and demonstrations of the latest medical diagnostic and intervention technology in front of other research teams, venture capitalists and medical device developers.
The presentations were critiqued by a professional panel. The audience voted for the technology it believed has the highest potential to make substantial changes in health care.
The annual Body Computing conference brings together leading experts in health care and technology to present findings on the next phase of development of applications and wireless devices that help people manage their health.
The Body Computing Conference and Slam were organized by Leslie Saxon, chief of the Division of Cardiology for the Keck School of Medicine, and sponsored by the Keck School.
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