Announcing the LabVIEW 2012 Biomedical Toolkit

[Steve.J]

Yes - it's official...the LabVIEW Biomedical Toolkit is released!  We are very excited about this new toolkit - it is the result of all several years of hard work by a dedicated team of biomedical enthusiasts here at NI and would not have been possible without all the support we received from you, the LabVIEW community. The tremendous success of the Biomedical Startup Kit on NI Labs gave us the confidence to continue the work on this project and bring it to a level of completeness, performance, and quality that we think will make it a standard tool for LabVIEW users involved in biomedical teaching and research.

The new LabVIEW Biomedical Toolkit combines the "executable" and "source code" versions of the previous startup kit and adds so much more. The Biomedical Logger is a full-function 8-channel datalogger that can acquire data at up to 10kS/sec per channel with conditional start and stop, multiple screen update modes, event markers, a "playback" mode, and the ability to create an additional 8 calculated channels in real-time - all with a simple and clean interface that gets you going quickly.  The calculated or "virtual" channels can be created, viewed and logged by processing any physical channel using a list of common functions (integral, derivative, filters, etc.) or even by specifying a LabVIEW VI of your own design. Just build the VI to our template and point to it from the dialog.

The Biosignal Generator, in addition to outputting from common file formats, can now synthesize ECG, EEG, and EMG signals using a variety of parameters - these can be used to validate hardware or software algorithms with well-defined, predictable waveforms. Very cool.

In addition to these powerful enhancements on the previous start-up kit - and perhaps even more exciting - many of the functions are available as Express VIs. This will greatly simplify the development of your own custom applications. File I/O, biosignal generation, biosignal processing...in total there are:

•9 Express VIs for DAQ/Simulation/File IO

•16 API VIs for Biosignal Preprocessing/Feature Extraction and Image Processing

•3 Controls for Displaying Biosignal and Image

We'll be posting articles on many of these new apps and VIs to further explain  the features and help get you started quickly.

Another great milestone - we just reached our 500 member milestone!  Thanks for all your support and please keep the suggestions coming - we are just getting started!