A consortium led by Noldus Information Technology has won the first place in a national ranking of technological research projects, organized by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. The Visual Lab project, with a budget of over 2.6 million guilders (1.2 million Euro), will investigate new methods and techniques to measure and analyze human behavior, movement and the performance of tasks. The technological know-how that will be developed in this project will form the basis for a new generation of products for research in the fields of psychology, ergonomics and medicine.

Behavior and physiology - The main aim of the project is to find ways of integrating the measurement, storage, retrieval and analysis of behavioral data and physiological signals. In this context 'behavioral data' includes movements, posture, gestures, facial expressions, speech, and so on, which is often recorded on video. The physiological signals that need to be integrated include things like heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, muscle tension, brain activity, etc. Current techniques can only measure and analyze all these different types of data separately. The Visual Lab project will carry out research into how to make synchronized measurements with different sensors, and how to integrate and store the data. The project will also include research into how the integrated data streams can be accessed, visualized and analyzed. The integration of behavioral and physiological data will enable researchers and clinicians to get answers to questions that are extremely hard to answer with current techniques.

Visual Lab - The project is called Visual Lab because the central medium in this research is visual data (video) and because the different modalities of measured processes have to be integrated into a work ('lab') environment. When the research has been completed, its results will lead to a platform on which future applications for integrated data acquisition and analysis can be based. These will have a clear added value in comparison with the current method of combining independent instrumentation systems.

National partnership - The ranking of project proposals was organized by Senter, the technology agency within the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Mick van Hattem, project advisor at Senter, comments: "Visual Lab was valued particularly highly because of the innovative technology, the economic perspectives of the proposed development, and the quality of the partnership." The consortium consists of two commercial companies and three research institutes:

• Noldus Information Technology, an innovative developer of software and instrumentation for research into human and animal behavior. The company has offices in Wageningen (The Netherlands), Freiburg (Germany) and Sterling (U.S.A), and is active in more than 65 countries.
• Syntech (Hilversum), a developer of advanced data acquisition systems and software for the registration and analysis of electrophysiological processes.
• The National Aerospace Laboratory in Amsterdam, the main Dutch institute for research into aircraft and space vehicles.
• The University Hospital of the 'Vrije Universiteit' of Amsterdam, represented by the gait laboratory of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine.
• The University of Groningen, represented by two research groups within the Department of Psychology: Experimental and Work Psychology, which investigates the relationship between mental stress and task performance, and Developmental and Experimental Clinical Psychology, which carries out research into attention processes.