GE Global Research, the technology development arm of the General Electric Company, is one of the world's most diversified industrial research labs, providing innovative technology for all of GE's businesses. Global Research has been the cornerstone of GE technology for more than 100 years, developing breakthrough innovations in areas such as medical imaging, energy generation technology, jet engines and lighting.

Most research and development facilities start from the ground up when it comes to designing new technology, but engineers at General Electric’s Global Research development arm have done just the opposite. They transformed one of the company’s existing home security motion sensors into a device that’s smart enough to classify different types of motion, even to the point of wirelessly monitoring a person’s breathing and heart rate.

 

The upgrades to the motion detector mostly came in the form of sophisticated processing algorithms that allow the sensor’s ‘brain’ to better process a person’s movement. Possible applications for the improved motion sensors include monitoring patients or the elderly at home, as well as neonatal infant health monitoring since premature babies often have skin that’s too fragile to physically attach sensors to.

 

The research is being done through a grant from the National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) Sensors and Surveillance Group, which is leading a program to develop new security sensing solutions that can more effectively monitor prisoners in correctional facilities.

 

Jeffrey Ashe, an electrical engineer at GE Global Research and the Principal Investigator on the sensing project, said that “We have essentially built a more sophisticated brain for an existing GE sensor that can tell whether someone is moving or motionless and whether an individual is breathing or not breathing. One of the most promising applications of this new technology could be in neonatal infant health monitoring. We have seen considerable interest from the medical community in having this type of wireless sensing capability to monitor the well-being of infants under intensive care.”

 

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