CPS: Breakthrough: Energy and Delay: Network Optimization in Cyber Physical Human Sensing Systems

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Wireless body area sensing networks (WBANs) have the potential to revolutionize health care in the near term and enhance other application domains including sports, entertainment, military and emergency situations. These WBANs represent a novel cyber-physical system that unites engineering systems, the natural world and human individuals. The coupling of bio-sensors with a wireless infrastructure enables the real-time monitoring of an individual's health, environment and related behaviors continuously, as well as the provision of real-time feedback with nimble, adaptive, and personalized interventions. Recent technological advances in low power integrated circuits, signal processing and wireless communications have enabled the design of tiny, low cost, lightweight, intelligent medical devices, sensors and networking platforms that have the potential to make the concept of truly pervasive wireless sensor networks a reality. To develop the WBANs of the future, this breakthrough research will pursue the interfaces of sensing, communication and control.This project aims to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision-making and control for health monitoring application of wireless body area networks. In these systems, sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed and communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes. All of these operations must be carried out in the presence of constraints on power and energy resources at the sensors, limited communication and computational abilities and with low end-to-end delay between the sensing of information to its eventual utilization. In this project, a global (end-to end) perspective is adopted that optimizes network operation to improve the information quality and enhance the lifetime of the network, focusing in particular on optimal use of sensor resources such as energy, new sensing and communication paradigms that balance information quality and energy expenditure, and real-time encoding and decoding methods that provide strict delay guarantees on information delivery. The proposed work will contribute to several research areas including optimal resource allocation at sensors, adaptive sensing methods, real-time encoding and decoding and event-based communication. The educational impact of the proposed research will come through the training of new information technology professionals and scientists with expertise in cross-disciplinary research, development of new courses based on the proposed research activity and continued efforts to include women and under-represented minorities in the research program.