The continuing research in the fields of the Internet of Things and Ubiquitous musical systems (e.g. via Smart Digital Musical Instruments) is enabling the creation of new technologies that facilitate remote user interactions and experiences. A very recent development is their fusion via a framework termed as the ‘Internet of Musical Things’ or IoMusT. This opens up new possibilities and challenges to advance the area of connected health systems. It would facilitate new musically-driven therapies and treatments via wearable devices and sensors acting as remote patient engagement and monitoring tools.
Such interdisciplinary research contributions are regularly presented in the Ubiquitous Music (UbiMus) Workshop which has been organised annually since 2007. Its cohort is a multidisciplinary network of research groups from Brazil, Europe, North America, and Oceania.
This year UbiMus2020 was organised at Universidade Federal do Sul da Bahia (UFSB) but due to COVID-19, the workshop held online (November 9 - 13, 2020). ALL Institute memeber, Dr. Joseph Timoney, Azeema Yaseen and Damien McEvoy from the Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University presented their idea of an IoMusT framework for bringing music and health technology together for wellbeing and music therapy applications. Their structure mediated the information flow between the therapist and patient across the network and incorporated AI-driven analysis and interaction. The presentation is available here and published article can be accessed on this link. Their next step will be to consider the implementation in greater detail and the nature of the data sources.
