A multinational team that includes several engineering researchers from UT Dallas has released the latest version of open source software for developing tiny wearable sensors.

Known as SPINE, short for Signal Processing in Node Environment, the software is intended for healthcare-monitoring applications in the emerging field of body sensor networks.

“This is part of the overall efforts in our Embedded Systems and Signal Processing Lab to develop open source platforms to monitor the progression of disease and provide feedback to aid in rehabilitation,” said Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas and director of the lab.

SPINE is an open source domain-specific framework designed to support flexible and distributed signal-processing for wireless sensor network systems. The main goal of SPINE is to provide body sensor network developers with support for rapidly prototyping applications. SPINE’s design principles include code reusability and efficiency, application interoperability and specific support for sensing operations.

SPINE’s developers hope that by making it widely available they’ll help others reduce development time for applications of body sensors.

Based at Italy’s Telecom Italia Lab, the SPINE project also includes researchers from the Wireless Sensor Networks Lab and the ASVES Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Calabria in Italy as well as the Embedded Systems and Signal Processing Lab at UT Dallas.