July 30, 2007 - National Instruments (NI) announced that Murat Guler and Dr. Seniz Ertugrul of Istanbul Technical University are winners of the 2007 National Instruments Arabia Virtual Instrumentation Academic Paper Contest.
Held in conjunction with the annual NI Arabia academic conference, the NI academic technical paper contest recognizes the most innovative virtual instrumentation applications based on NI software and hardware in Arabia, North Africa and Turkey. Engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia use virtual instrumentation – the combination of graphical programming software and modular hardware – to acquire, analyze and present data; optimize control equipment; and rapidly design, prototype and deploy embedded systems.
Guler and Ertugrul used virtual instrumentation technology from NI to design, prototype and test a wearable vital body sign monitoring system called the ARF-Smart Shirt. The ARF-Smart Shirt system measures subjects’ vital signs such as respiration rate and body posture using small sensors embedded in shirt fabric and transmits the data wirelessly to an analysis device. With the National Instruments LabVIEW graphical development environment and NI data acquisition hardware, Guler and Ertugrul could accurately log and analyze sensor data in real time to improve system design and prototypes.
“Initially, serial communication protocols using C programming and programmable integrated chips were used to transmit and process RF signals, but this method did not yield good results within a reasonable amount of time,” said Guler, a Master of Science student at Istanbul Technical University. “After this study, National Instruments LabVIEW and data acquisition products are our indispensable choice.”
Ertugrul will represent the winning team and NI region at NIWeek 2007, the worldwide virtual instrumentation conference and exhibition in August in Austin, Texas, compliments of National Instruments.
To read Guler and Ertugrul’s winning paper and others submitted for the contest, visit www.ni.com/turkey.
About National Instruments
National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 25,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 10 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 4,300 employees and direct operations in nearly 40 countries. For the past eight years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.
