The Bremen State Parliament has approved 2.9 million euros of funding from the State of Bremen and 1.9 million euros from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) for the project. “The Biosignals Hub will use modern AI technology to gain fundamentally new medical insights from biosignal data. This is a great success for the university – at a forward-looking interface with direct application potential,” says Professor Jutta Günther, President of the University of Bremen.
Over a period of four years, the researchers will work on two main areas: developing biosignal devices and central computing infrastructure. “There are already devices such as smartphones or smartwatches that record pulse, blood pressure, or movement data,” explains Tanja Schultz. “We want to extend this information to include data such as brainwaves and measure mental activities such as attention and workload.” The devices she and her team are developing should be comfortable to wear and connected to smartphones that store the data locally.
The development of these devices poses two main challenges. First, they generate a very large amount of data. Second, collecting and processing personal biosignal data requires paying special attention to ethical data collection in line with data protection. Therefore, Tanja Schultz and her team’s project is developing storage and computing infrastructure in which data is stored, evaluated, and explained. They are also working on an ethical data collection and data protection concept that analyzes voluntary data contributions using Privacy Preserving Analytics techniques and processes them in accordance with the EU guidelines for trustworthy AI. The required server infrastructure is to be installed at the University of Bremen so that storing and processing the data can take place locally without needing any international cloud services.
After creating the foundation with biosignal devices and technical infrastructure, Tanja Schultz wants to use additional, project-external funds to develop a portal with that would make the data available to research and development facilities. “The goal is to create an extensive collection of biosignal data in which hundreds of volunteers can record their everyday lives in as much detail as possible over the years,” says Dr. Jana Schill, who will work on the project as a postdoc at the Cognitive Systems Lab (CSL). As a neuroscientist, she is particularly interested in long-term changes in brain activity. Tanja Schultz emphasizes, “The Biosignals Hub represents a unique resource that enables us to individualize AI methods, tailoring them precisely to the individual.” For example, a cooperation of voluntary trial participants and hospitals would be possible. The latter could evaluate the biosignal data of the participants in order to diagnose Parkinson’s or dementia at an early stage.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Tanja Schultz
Faculty of Mathematics/Computer Science
University of Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-64270
Email: tanja.schultzuni-bremen.de
