Real-Time Acquisition

At present, the main system in use at Haskins Laboratories for real-time data acquisition of physiological signals is a Haskins-developed system called HART -- the Haskins Laboratories Real-Time Acquisition system.
Documentation for HART is available in PDF format.

HART is often used in conjunction with other software packages. Examples of commercial software in use at Haskins Laboratories include MATLAB; the Interactive Laboratory System (ILS) and N!Power from Signal Technology, Inc. for signal processing; and the Biomedical Data Processing (BMDP) system for statistical work.

A large portion of our in-house work has focused on the development of systems used in the acquisition and analysis of large physiological data sets. Taken together these programs comprise the HART system. The Haskins Experiment Program (HEX) is used to control on-line real-time experiments. HEX captures data in input 'bursts' where from 1 to 64 channels of data are multiplexed into a single file, which is stored on disk. The input channels can be sampled either at the same or at different rates. HEX also keeps a record of experimental conditions, including the channels, the experimental design, and the names of the multiplexed files. The Real-Time System File Tool (RTF) is used to demultiplex files created by HEX into files containing the data for the individual channels that were sampled.

Further signal processing is done with the Haskins Analysis Display and Experiment System (HADES). This program lets the user interactively display and label signal files. HADES contains routines for event marking such as peaks, valleys, and zero crossings, for spectral analysis using DFT and LPC, and for filtering of signals using filters created by the user. A prominent feature of HADES is the incorporation of a procedural language (SPIEL) that permits the creation and customization of specialized analysis procedures that are similar to functions and subroutines in programming languages like C. This procedural language lets users automate operations and measurement procedures. The results of measurements made in HADEhadesS are stored in files. After editing, these files can be read by routines of the BMDP package to perform descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Files containing summary statistics and other information can then be transferred to the microcomputer network for additional analysis, data plotting, and figure and manuscript preparation.

We are also collaborating with colleagues at the ATR Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, on the development of a new, PC-based real-time acquisition system called Maggie (written by Mark Tiede).

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