What is Bioacoustic Sensing? Top 2 Bioacoustic Sensing Companies

Bioacoustic Sensing combines sensing technology, machine learning, biology and acoustics. This involves neurophysiological and anatomical basis of sound production and detection, and relation of acoustic signals to the medium they disperse through.

Bioacoustics uses digital technology, including equipment and software, to record and analyze the sounds.Listening is one of the main methods used in bioacoustical research. Animal behaviour and the signals themselves are used for gaining insight into the production, detection and interpretation of sounds in animals.

Bioacoustics Sensing has been used to locate, identify animals and their condition, used in humans for medical applications, such as measuring body sounds on skin surface. It is also used in wearable consumer electronics with mobile phones, laptops and electronic appliances. In healthcare, the medical applications include monitoring and evaluation of vitals.

Skinput is a technology that appropriates the human body for acoustic transmission and SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information.

Bioacoustic Sensing Landscape

Skinput

Skinput is an input technology that uses bio-acoustic sensing to localize finger taps on the skin. When augmented with a pico-projector, the device can provide a direct manipulation, graphical user interface on the body.

The technology was developed by Chris Harrison, Desney Tan, and Dan Morris, at Microsoft Research's Computational User Experiences Group.Skinput represents one way to decouple input from electronic devices with the aim of allowing devices to become smaller without simultaneously shrinking the surface area on which input can be performed. Skinput employs acoustics, which take advantage of the human body's natural sound conductive properties. This allows the body to be annexed as an input surface without the need for the skin to be invasively instrumented with sensors, tracking markers, or other items.

Skinput has been publicly demonstrated as an armband, which sits on the biceps. This prototype contains ten small cantilevered Piezo elements configured to be highly resonant, sensitive to frequencies between 25 and 78 Hz.

Skinput

SixthSense

SixthSense is a gesture-based wearable computer system developed at MIT Media Lab, developed by Steve Mann and Pranav Mistry. SixthSense comprises a headworn or neck-worn pendant that contains both a data projector and camera. SixthSense technology contains a pocket projector, and a camera contained in a head-mounted, handheld or pendant-like, wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to a mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks users' hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tips of the user’s fingers. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. SixthSense supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

SixthSense