CENS Technical Seminar Series

Body Sensor Network in Pervasive Computing Environments for Health Care

pdf slides

Invited Speaker: David Jea and Ian Yap, NESL, UCLA
Date: June 8, 2007
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: 4760 Boelter Hall, UCLA

Abstract

To allow for an efficient usage of an embedded device in pervasive computing environments, reliable and yet convenient user access is an important requirement. The problem becomes more complex when the accessed device is shared by the public with many different individuals. This talk first illustrates the common pitfalls and issues of establishing sessions to such devices. The paper then proposes a context-aware solution that uses different contexts to capture a usage session. The talk then presents a general system design that supports a secure, selective, and identifiable user access of public shared devices with high usability. We have also implemented a prototype system to demonstrate the concept.

In the second part of the talk, we consider that Body sensor networks (BSN) sometimes involve a dynamic and flexible membership of its sensors especially when monitoring of massive users in a disaster scenario. The problem of estranged devices requires a transfer of ownership from one BSN to a different BSN. Based on the models, a BSN has to adapt different mechanisms to address possible threats caused by estranged devices. The objective of our work is to illustrate this problem in detail and demonstrate how we can exploit dynamic context data collected in a BSN (worn by a patient) to solve the estranged-device problem. We also propose an experiment to show how a BSN can infer the ownership of a body sensor node.

Biography

David Jea received his B.S. in Computer Science from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 1998 and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2005. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the EE departments at UCLA, where he works under Prof. Mani Srivastava in Networked Embedded Systems Laboratory. His research focuses on the design of context-based body sensor networks. The work he is presenting in this talk will also be presented at the HealthNet 2007, the First International Workshop on Systems and Networking Support for Health Care and Assisted Living Environments, to be hold in conjunction with Mobisys 2007.

Ian Yap has received M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at UCLA in 2007, working under Prof. Mani Srivastava in the Networked Embedded Systems Lab. The focus of his research is on the detection and resolution of ownership issues for sensors within mobile body sensor networks. Ian received his B.S. degree in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 prior to graduate school, and has interned at Apple Computer and IBM. The work he is presenting in this talk will also be demonstrated at the HealthNet 2007.