Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Smartphones are enabling an entirely new set of applications, resulting in a fundamental impact on people's lives. Smartphones today are being used for services beyond simple phone calls and messaging, including assitance for seniors and helpful aids for caregivers. In the future, they promise radical applications like enabling blind people to capture video and photos and in general interact with their physical environment. This is made possible through myriad sensors that smartphones include (e.g., camera, touch, and gyroscopes), the compute capability of the underlying hardware (upto quad-core CPUs today), and pervasive network connectivity. Exploiting the capabilities of the smartphone is a very challenging task due to the limited energy source of the battery; currently none of the applications for assisted living can be alive for more than 6-8hrs.We seek to enable smartphone devices to deliver applications that require long periods of activity and 24hr availability. We will achieve this through an radical cross-layer approach to smartphone energy management extending from software methods in applications, operating system to hardware device drivers. We will seek tounderstand how each layer can contribute to managing power consumption while at the same time ensuring good quality of user experience. We will develop software interfaces that specify power management duties of the different layers and control what information must flow across. Expected benefits include a fundamental improvement in battery life of smartphones resulting in truly ubiquituous computing that enables a fundamental breakthrough in applications targeting mobile healthcare and assisted living.