Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Healthcare costs have been skyrocketing as the baby boom generation continues to grey. Remote e-health monitoring has been shown to be promising for decreasing emergency room visits and/or hospitalizations, as compared to standard traditional healthcare. With the advancement of wireless communications and networking technology, wireless sensor networks on human body are emerging as a new approach to monitoring patient health and disease progression. This research project focuses on development of wireless body area sensor networks for e-healthcare applications. It will develop a new set of networking solutions for power-efficient, reliable, and privacy-preserving wireless information delivery, taking account of the unique propagation characteristics and strict networking performance requirements. It will (i) analyze and develop network topology with potential relay node and cooperative communications to guarantee reliability in information transfer, (ii) develop a medium access control scheme to achieve high energy efficiency for sensor nodes in a body-area propagation environment, and (iii) develop information security and privacy preservation protocols that are critical for transmitting sensitive patient healthcare information and identity between the patient and healthcare providers. This project, pursued in close collaboration with the industrial sponsor, Care In Motion Technology Inc., will contribute to develop future healthcare systems which are expected to offer high quality services to patients with low costs through a variety of applications enabled by wireless communications and information technologies. The research outcomes will help to foster cost efficient homecare services, complimentary to hospital care. Eight graduate students and two postdoctoral fellows, together with undergraduate students, will work in this project, doing research in the latest development of wireless body area sensor networks and information security, emerging as expert additions to the Canadian high technology industry labor force.