Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

E-healthcare is an emerging and promising solution to enable pervasive, precise, and patient-centered healthcare services, based on advanced information and communication technology. With continuous monitoring capability from wearable medical devices and knowledge inferring capability from cloud computing, e-healthcare can greatly improve service efficiency and reduce healthcare cost, especially for people on the go and at home, complementary to hospital care. This research project focuses on acquisition and processing of various types of biomedical signal and health information for e-healthcare applications. It will develop a new set of engineering solutions for reliable, precise and continuous health monitoring, diagnosis, and prediction, and for information sharing with privacy protection. In particular, it will investigate and develop accurate and reliable medical signal acquisition algorithms from biosensors, a real-time solution for precise and continuous cuffless blood pressure detection under normal daily activities with movement, a cloud computing based health knowledge inference platform for real-time health status analysis, information security and privacy preservation solutions for social-network based e-healthcare information sharing. The project will generate new ideas and techniques which will provide significant benefits to Canadian healthcare users. Pursued in close collaboration with corporate industrial sponsor CIM, the research is expected to make important contributions to the development of engineering solutions for future e-healthcare systems. Six graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows, together with undergraduate students, will develop the latest innovations in information and networking systems, emerging as expert additions to the Canadian high technology industry labor force.