Keynote Speaker

Advanced wearable health platforms have the potential of providing monitoring of an individual’s critical health parameters and their personal environmental exposure in a reliable, accurate, long-term/continuous, hassle-free manner can create a paradigm shift in chronic disease management. Long term monitoring of multiple health and environmental sensors, enabled by ultra-low power electronics and energy harvesting, can produce always on platforms that can have disruptive benefits such as prevention of negative outcomes, providing on demand feedback to users on their lifestyle choices, understanding the impact of environment on health, building personalized health databases for individuals that span years and even decades and predict onset of life threatening health conditions using data analytics and longitudinal data.

This talk will present the work being carried out in the NSF ERC Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST) Center on building disruptive health platforms that are wearable, wireless, comfortable, powered by the human body, and consist of multimodal health and environment sensors. In the Center, power is being harvested from the human body in the form of heat and movement/strain and utilized very effectively using subthreshold CMOS computation and ultra low power novel radios.  In addition, ASSIST is building medically validated low-power health sensors (EKG, hydration, pulse-oximetry, biochemical markers such as glucose/lactate and even personal environmental exposures to toxins such as ozone (related to Asthma triggers) and particulate matter (related to Asthma triggers and heart rate variability) that go much further than simple activity monitoring and provide a significantly more sophisticated understanding of human health due to correlation of multiple/heterogeneous data streams.  This combination of harvesting power from the human body and using it effectively using low power logic/radios and sensors enable “forever” powering of sensors by small energy harvesters.  Ultimately, these sensor systems with their miniature form factors, unlimited operating lifetime, reliable operation and supported by existing cloud infrastructure can convert sensor data to actionable information and create a paradigm shift in future global health.  Access to this level of individual health data can revolutionize medical practices, decrease the cost for medical care.