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March 17, 2022

Health Sciences Sensor Lab Open for Collaboration

Jennifer Barton (left), PhD, director of the UArizona Health Sciences Sensor Lab, and Gustavo de Oliveira Almeida (middle), PhD, coordinator of the Sensor Lab, are excited to officially open for business. “We want people to see our space and to begin successful collaborations,” Dr. Almeida says.

The Sensor Lab is a part of a UArizona Health Sciences strategic initiative to open new frontiers for better health. The lab serves as a hub to encourage creativity and innovation in research and education by providing access to sensor technology and expertise. Open to researchers and students across the university, the Sensor Lab offers advanced sensor systems and development platforms, as well as reconfigurable testing spaces and expertise in data collection and analysis.

“There was a real need for this resource not only at Health Sciences, but really across the entire University of Arizona campus,” said Gustavo de Oliveira Almeida, PhD, coordinator in the Sensor Lab. “We have a space that brings interdisciplinary investigators together, and we are going to be able to put state-of-the-art technology in more people's hands.”

The Sensor Lab will host a grand opening for faculty and staff on Tuesday, March 22, from 4 to 6 p.m.

The Health Sciences Sensor Lab is a new strategic initiative that provides access to sensor technology and digital mixed-reality expertise to encourage creativity and innovation in multidisciplinary research and education within and beyond the university.
Dr. Almeida shows off one of two Sensor Lab rooms featuring reconfigurable layout options. The rooms can be prepared with the equipment required by the users and reserved for the conduction of research studies.
The Sensor Lab is outfitted with a variety of flexible wearable sensors and offers environmental monitoring, 360 video and audio recording, along with analytical tools and multimodal feedback capabilities.
Yuanyuan (Kay) He, PhD, (left), an assistant professor at the UArizona Fred Fox School of Music, was one of the first people to take advantage of the Sensor Lab’s capabilities. Dr. He is the composer of StellarScape, an unprecedented combination of music, dance, and cinematography, blended with state-of-the-art data visualization and astrophysical simulation.
A network of sensors, including a wearable wrist sensor, track the motions of performers in StellarScape. A 360-degree motion sensor also captures the dancer’s motions from a bird’s eye perspective.
To produce StellarScape, data is collected from the sensors and processed in near real-time by a computer, providing the audience with the allusion that the dancer is creating the movements of particles on the video screen in the background.
The collaboration with StellarScape helped push the limits of what the Sensor Lab is capable of doing, says Dr. Almeida, coordinator of the Sensor Lab.
Students from the Arizona Simulation Technology and Education Center used heart rate monitors provided by the Sensor Lab to conduct a study on the impact of stress on surgical skill retention.
The study found that when surgical trainees were put under a time constraint to learn a skill, they demonstrated better retention of that skill than participants who were not stressed with a time limit.
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