Mobile System Design for Health-care Applications

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Mobile System Design for Health-care Applications"

by

Miss Qianyi HUANG


Abstract:

Healthcare is the most important issue facing both the individuals and the 
country. As Internet-of-things is revolutionizing many areas, we expect 
that healthcare industry will be reformed by the trend of 
Internet-of-things. Although this has drawn the attention of both the 
industry and academia, there are many opening problems.

In this thesis, we mainly focus on the following topics:

1. Extending battery life for the on-body device. A bottleneck for 
wearable technology is its limited battery life. We note that wearable 
devices have the opportunity to harvest energy from the human body. We 
propose a battery-free sensing platform for wearable devices in the 
form-factor of shoes. It harvests the kinetic energy from walking to 
supply devices with power. We achieve this goal by enabling the whole 
system running on the harvested energy from two feet. Each foot performs 
separate tasks and two feet are coordinated by ambient backscatter 
communication.

2. Data security on IoT devices. We report a covert channel threat on 
existing mobile systems. Through it, malware can wirelessly leak 
information without making network connections or emitting signals. The 
operation is achieved by controlling the impedance of a device’s wireless 
network interface card. Importantly, the operation requires no special 
privileges on current mobile OSs, which allows the malware to stealthily 
pass sensitive data to an attacker’s nearby mobile device, which can then 
decode the signal and thus effectively gather the guarded data.

3. Incentive mechanism for encouraging user engagement. It is embarrassing 
that users easily lose interest in these health-tracking devices. In order 
to encourage user participation, there are programs that will reward users 
for their healthy behavior. We model it as a monopoly market and 
theoretically analyze how all parties would behave in this program.

In addition to these problems in mobile system design, we also devote our 
efforts to design mobile systems for monitoring dietary behaviors. We 
design a pair of a smart-glasses prototype that can detect mastication by 
monitoring the muscle activity from the temporalis muscle. We also design 
a smart spoon prototype that can recognize what food is placed on top 
during meals.


Date:			Friday, 9 February 2018

Time:                  	3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3494
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Wei Wang (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Kai Chen
  			Prof. Bo Li


**** ALL are Welcome ****