UbiNIRS: A Software Framework for Miniaturized NIRS-based Applications

TL;DR

UbiNIRS is a versatile software framework that simplifies the development and deployment of miniaturized NIRS applications, enabling non-experts to create, manage, and crowdsource NIRS-based sensing solutions efficiently.

Contribution

It introduces a generic server and mobile app system that eliminates the need for programming expertise in NIRS application development.

Findings

Enables rapid NIRS application deployment without coding.

Supports spectrum crowdsourcing to build NIRS knowledge base.

Facilitates in situ pill testing and other applications.

Abstract

We present UbiNIRS, a software framework for rapid development and deployment of applications using miniaturized near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS is an emerging material sensing technology that has shown a great potential in recent work from the HCI community such as in situ pill testing. However, existing methods require significant programming efforts and professional knowledge of NIRS, and hence, challenge the creation of new NIRS based applications. Our system helps to resolve this issue by providing a generic server and a mobile app, using the best practices for NIRS applications in literature. The server creates and manages UbiNIRS instances without the need for any coding or professional knowledge of NIRS. The mobile app can register multiple UbiNIRS instances by communicating with the server for different NIRS based applications. Furthermore, UbiNIRS enables NIRS spectrum crowdsourcing for building a knowledge base.