BOB is an application developed for Maastricht University.

The application is used during research to understand the risk for impulsive aggression.

To do this research, the university has chosen a punching bag in the shape of a person called BOB. During the experiment, the force of 2 boxing gloves is measured. When a punch is detected, the force is integrated to get the impulse of that moment. During the experiment a number of feedback sounds are played to trigger the person under test.

The application uses a National Instruments USB-6008 device. BOB uses the 8 analog in channels for force measurements. 4 channels are used for the left boxing glove and 4 for the right glove. Each channel has a force sensor on the glove so each glove has 4 force sensors. During the experiment the 8 channels are sampled at 1kHz and the channels are combined to have 1 force measurement for each glove. When this force reaches a certain threshold a punch is detected and the integration starts to calculate the impulse. During the experiment the calculated forces are streamed to disk and a window of 1 minute is shown on screen with impulse annotations and experiment progress.

For testing and demo purposes the application also has a built-in simulator. The LabVIEW application is programmed using object oriented development techniques, making sure the application is easily extensible to support future needs.