Oliver Amft

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QBIC - Q-Belt Integrated Computer
A complete computing system integrated into a common accessory - a belt.

Design

A belt is an ideal accessory even to carry some weight (e.g. batteries). Centred at the body, close to the centre of mass, QBIC is exposed to small accelerations in daily life.

The Q-Belt Integrated Computer (QBIC) is fully-fledged computer integrated into a common accessory - a belt. QBIC has enough computational power to support a wide range of applications such as recognising activities of daily living, tracking location or monitoring of user actions in work process flows, to name a few. See the insight story...

Team

I am proud to lead a team of very talented people in the design, hardware and software development as well as application deployment. The system is batch produced at ETH Zurich as a research platform and provided to the wearable community.


Architecture

The QBIC buckle holds the CPU (ARM XScale) and memory resources (256MB SDRAM). A Bluetooth controller and MMC slot is available as well. The belt works as extension bus, providing USB, Serial (RS232) and VGA interfaces.

RS232 and VGA interfaces require a passive adapter cable. This design was chosen to keep the belt easy to wear.


Power

QBIC is powered from a belt-integrated battery. A attachable external battery is provided as well. QBIC supports hot-swapping of the external battery: the battery can be replaced with a fresh charged one without stopping/restarting the system.

Battery capacities:

Belt internal battery 750mAh
Attachable external battery 4400mAh


Operating Systems

QBIC runs Linux (C) and Active Oberon. At the Electronics Lab., we manage a Familiar Linux distribution providing access to a vast variety of application packages. These can be installed on QBIC without configuration/compilation.

See also: Amft et al., ASAP 2004.
Performance

The CPU scales clock frequency between 133 to 400 MHz. At 400 MHz the system runs for 8 hours from the attachable battery (hot-swappable).

QBIC buckle dimensions (WxHxD):    60 x 52 x 35 mm

QBIC (buckle+belt) weight:                356 grams



Generation QBIC
The QBIC buckles of the 2nd generation (version 1.5) are white, those of the 3rd generation (version 2.0) are black.



QBIC-based Projects
Activity Tracker - Recording daily activities. The system was presented at ISWC 2007 in Boston. (2007-present)

Team: Martin Kusserow, Oliver Amft
ColdCruncher - A miniaturised QBIC co-processor for processing high-bandwidth sensor inputs, such as sound. (2006-present)

Maintainer: Oliver Amft
NESD - Outdoor location tracking with QBIC, GPS and a Head-Mounted Display. GPS-based local map visualisation. (2006)

Team: Clemens Lombriser, Oliver Amft

See the NESD video.
MyActivity Walking Habits Monitor - Online recognition of up/down walking, stairs up/down, elevator using QBIC, a acceleration+air pressure sensor (ARSB), heart rate monitor and the CRN Toolbox. (ca. 2004-5)

Team: Oliver Amft, David Bannach, Thomas Stiefmeier, Christoph Böcklin
Workshop Activity Demo - Online recognition of wood-workshop assembly activities (hammering, srewdriving, sanding, vising) using QBIC, wrist-worn motion sensor. (2004-2006)
Hospital Information Management - Gesture-controlled access to patient's documents using QBIC, wrist-worn motion sensor, CRN Toolbox. (2006-present)

Team: David Bannach


Links

last update: 2008-01-03