Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Emergency healthcare is one of the key factors affecting the quality-of-life of the general population. A major challenge in providing emergency healthcare assistance is consolidation of data from myriads of different sources to make an informed decision. In many cases, healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses and EMTs work in isolation with problems in communicating and exchanging appropriate information and important decisions at the right time. Recent advances in sensor and communications technology have made round the clock monitoring and data collection much easier. Similar advances in information processing technologies have facilitated the multitude of health monitoring and decision-making to alert health professionals to threatening conditions and assist them in making proper diagnostic decisions. Moreover, recent advances in immersive environments like Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) have opened up possibilities to provide emergency assistance locally or remotely through utilizing AR/VR for achieving a better sense of the state of a patient through data visualization. Yet overall very limited effort has been invested in integrating data analysis, decision making, and immersive visualization into one healthcare system, due to various multidisciplinary technical challenges.* We propose to investigate modern information processing techniques to facilitate medical emergency service. We will develop healthcare systems utilizing various IoT sensors to record the symptoms of the patients and analyze the data with smart signal processing/recognition and visualization methods to assist the healthcare professionals in performing timely diagnosis and decision-making in emergency situations. Specifically, we attempt to solve challenging problems in intelligent signal processing and feature representation of the IoT data, robust information fusion, and context-aware visualization in immersive environment. A prototype system will be developed, and integrated into the industry partner's healthcare platform and deployed in hospitals and other healthcare units to evaluate the performances of the technologies developed.*