A four-member team from the Industrial Technology Research Institute attended this year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, where they showcased their “Phantom of L.I.K.A.” a device used to measure muscle patterns of violinists as they play.
It was the first time Taiwan had taken part in the summit, in which heavyweights such as IBM, AT&T, and Cisco gathered to demonstrate their innovations and share their visions for cloud computing, according to a statement issued by the institute.
The wearable sensor developed by the L.I.K.A. team uses mechanomyogram (MMG) detection technology to capture vibrational signals emitted by muscles and record subtle arm and finger movements, it said, adding that with the data from the OpenStack cloud platform, data measuring the violinists’ finger pressure and speed can be tracked.
In the future, it is to be used to gather and analyze data from virtuoso players, offering a more efficient and precise learning method, the institute said.
The data could also be shared on social media for online learning, it said.
Given MMG’s potential for translating body signals into data, it is applicable to other fields besides music.
Skills such as ramenmaking or dough-kneading could be transferable to apprentices via a more scientific and systematic method, it said.
The L.I.K.A. team came from backgrounds in hardware setup, network architecture, cloud computing and software design to develop a novel service application, team leader Tzao Szu-han (曹思漢) said at the OpenStack Summit.
“We are thrilled to be present in this grand event and to showcase our innovation to the global community of cloud experts,” Tzao said.
The L.I.K.A. team, which won the grand prize in the Taiwan OpenStack Hackathon, was invited to showcase its design at this year’s OpenStack Summit. OpenStack is a free, open-source software platform for cloud computing.
The OpenStack Foundation held its first hackathon in Taipei from March 18 to March 20, attracting more than 200 people in 35 teams to develop innovative cloud-based applications for the “City of the Future” within 41 hours.
The L.I.K.A. team, which consisted of four staff members from the institute’s Service Systems Technology Center — Tzao, Wu Chi-kang (吳季剛), Liao Zhong-wei (廖仲偉) and Liu Jian-hong (劉建宏) — was singled out for its “Phantom of L.I.K.A.”
“Innovation is an essential part of Taiwan’s industrial transformation,” said Yu Shiaw-shian (余孝先), director-general of the institute’s Service Systems Technology Center.
Yu said the award-winning muscle signal-detection technology was originally used in the medical sector and that the L.I.K.A. team adapted it to learning a musical instrument.
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