The Snap! toolkit : a model for pluggable monitoring

Abstract

Thousands of engineering hours have been spent duplicating efforts as independent groups, each toward their own application, all build the core parts of a body monitoring system. A search of the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE database on the words "physiology" and "monitoring" returns a list of 66,461 documents from 1966 to present. This thesis describes the Snap! sensor architecture, a toolkit designed to address this problem. It provides a set of modules and interconnect protocols to give the system designer a foundation from which to build embedded sensor devices. By defining a set of standards that maximize both modularity and flexibility, Snap! has eliminated the need to constantly rebuild the fundamental pieces of a monitor. Because of its organization, Snap! is particularly suited to the rapid prototyping of experimental systems.