New podcast episode: The secret power of biosignals
She is particularly proud of her research into silent communication, in which sensors on the face measure muscle activity and use it to reconstruct speech. This offers hope for people who can no longer speak.
With the new Biosignals Hub project, Tanja wants to create a place where citizens can experience for themselves what it means when body data is collected, shared, and processed. To this end, a large infrastructure is being created in Bremen: servers with 40 petabytes of storage, new sensor technology, and mobile devices that can record biosignals in everyday life. Participants decide for themselves when and what they record. This is a counter-concept to the opaque data collection practices of large tech companies.
The goal is not only research, but also education: the Biosignals Hub aims to create transparency about what data we disclose and what power it holds. Tanja emphasizes that people should make conscious decisions about whether and how they want to share their data. Only those who understand what is being collected can truly decide for or against it. According to Tanja, Bremen, with its university culture and freedom of research, is the ideal location for this project.
At the same time, she works in the DFG research group Lifespan AI, which, together with the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, develops methods to predict health and disease across the entire lifespan. Cohort data is combined with new biosignal recordings to better identify long-term patterns. This creates bridges between classical epidemiology and AI-based sensor research.
Finally, Tanja talks about the social dimension of her work: about questions of power, about the responsibility of research, and about new rights that we need – such as the “right to be forgotten” in AI. She argues that systems must learn not only to delete data, but also to forget what they have learned. Only then can technology become more human. Her vision: a digital future in which enlightenment, freedom, and technology work together rather than against each other.
Watch/listen now and gain exciting insights:YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Dezer