- Date:
- 2010-2014
- Theme:
- Novel Sensors
- Funding:
- EUFP7
BRAVEHEALTH proposes a patient-centric vision to CVD management and treatment, providing people already diagnosed as subjects at risk with a sound solution for continuous and remote monitoring and real time prevention of malignant events. The solution proposed will be made up of the following sub-systems: 1)WEARABLE UNIT: it is an innovative concept of miniaturised multiparameter sensor, able to continuously monitoring the most critical parameters needed to perform a thorough diagnosis by means of specific diagnostic and prognostic algorithms running on it. It will be possible both to perform scheduled analysis of critical parameters and to remotely trigger the screening of specific vital signs. 2)REMOTE MANAGEMENT UNIT: it represents the main interface between physicians and the system, providing both automated support, in the form of text messages with information or suggestions to the patient directly generated by the system, and doctor managed supervision, allowing direct communication with the patients with voice/text/chat messages. The most important added value of the this unit is the possibility to be interfaced with existing National Health Records and Physiological Data Banks in order to generating and verifying risk prediction models using advanced data mining approaches. 3)LIFE! GATEWAY: Data acquired by the wearable unit will be relayed to a gateway which represents the means by which the information flow from the user to the Central Supervision Unit. This unit will provide the user with the following functionalities: a)Real time communications: in case of anomalies, or simply to suggest specific drugs to be taken, or to advice some particular activity to be performed; 2)Location aware information, exploiting the positioning capabilities of GPS. 3)Mobile virtual community for education and support.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
Associated research groups
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2008-2011
- Theme:
- Modeling and Simulation
- Funding:
- (British Council, UKIERI)
This is a collaborative project with MNIT, Jaipur and IISc, Bangalore, India, to investigate the porting of electronic design automation algorithms to multi-processor platforms.
Primary investigator
Partners
- MNIT, Jaipur
- IISc, Bangalore
Associated research groups
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2010-2010
- Themes:
- Novel Sensors, Pervasive Healthcare and Telemedicine, Healthcare in ECS
- Funding:
- Adventure in Research Grant
Sensory feedback is essential for motor learning and critical to recovery from neurological impairment, such as stroke. In neurological conditions, sensory deficits are often present, limiting the potential for recovery. Current understanding of neuroplasticity would support the argument that sensory, cutaneous input (stimulation that is applied to the skin) may enhance sensory-motor learning. Current rehabilitation robots use interfaces, such as virtual reality, to increase patient motivation during therapy. However, these systems do not give tactile feedback as you would normally experience when you grasp or interact with a real object. There is a need to design a system for effective recovery of reaching and grasping following stroke that is compatible with a range of rehabilitation robots, is low-cost and can translate between hospital or home use.
In humans, haptic sensory information is both tactile (related to contact and pressure) and kinaesthetic (related to position and motion). A range of different technologies, devices, methods and techniques have been proposed for providing a realistic tactile feedback to the fingertip, and a range of these will be investigated in this project. Other applications of the technology are in virtual reality for computer aided design and gaming.
This collaborative project (between the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the School of Health Sciences) is developing novel devices for providing a tactile sensation to a personââ¬â¢s fingertip using a variety of different technologies and mechanisms. The developed devices are evaluated through human studies to ascertain which provide the most realistic and usable sensations for use in stroke rehabilitation. Each device will be evaluated by iterative testing with unimpaired participants and stroke patients to identify which mechanism(s) provide a realistic sensation and satisfies aesthetic, comfort, reliability and calibration considerations. The project is also investigating the development and evaluation of a wearable system for providing tactile feedback to all fingers on a hand, that can potentially be integrated with an existing rehabilitation robot.
Primary investigators
Secondary investigator
- Dr Sara Demain
Associated research groups
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2008-
- Themes:
- Wireless Sensing and Sensor Networks, Energy Harvesting, Energy Harvesting & Sensing Devices, Low-Energy Sustainable Systems, Low-Energy Sustainable Systems
- Funding:
- EPSRC
The severe constraints imposed by limited battery life on applications such as remote unattended sensing has led to a ever-growing interest in realizing perpetually-powered, batteryless embedded systems powered by ambient energy sources. Depending upon the application, the design of such systems is challenged by variability in environment as well as small harvested-power availability. Increasing efficiency of harvesters while minimizing losses in energy conversion/storage is only a partial solution; to achieve true perpetual operation these systems need to be adaptive to harvested-energy availability.
The research under this topic focuses upon advancing the state-of-the-art in realization of harvested-energy awareness at a system-level. This involves developing and/or optimizing modules that enable low overhead energy monitoring and prediction while taking into account the limitations inherent in energy harvesting and storage components in a system. These modules are key building blocks for implementing robust energy-harvesting powered systems that feature graceful degradation user requirements with harvested-energy availability.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigator
- mia08r
Associated research groups
- Pervasive Systems Centre
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2009-
- Themes:
- Low-Energy Sustainable Systems, Systems Design, Model-Based Verification, Formal Methods, Low-Energy Sustainable Systems, Low-Energy Sustainable Systems
The advent of low-cost, low-power multi-core systems provides the opportunity to exploit the parallelism offered by such systems. However, even if high-level programming models are provided to exploit this parallelism, it is important that the underlying memory-model supports parallel programming in an efficient way. It is also important that the memory model is rigorously defined to facilitate the proper verification of parallel applications.
The memory model defines behaviours of transactions between the memory and the processor. For a uniprocessor system, microarchitectures like out-of-order execution, speculative execution, forwarding and cache hierarchy could effectively increase the performance of systems. For a multiprocessor system with shared memory, such techniques may easily break the sequential consistency in a multi-thread programme and result in unexpected execution. Therefore, weak memory models introduce barrier (fence) instructions to keep the sequential consistency while maintain the optimized system performance by using those techniques. And the verification of the system becomes an important issue to ensure the system behaviours as expected. However, the verification of weak memory models is inefficient by using simulation-based approach. So the formal method-based verification approach is investigated.
Formal methods are mathematical based technique to model and verify software and hardware systems by using model checking and theorem proving [1]. Event-b is one of formal methods which are based on set theory for system-level modelling and analysis. In Event-b, a chain of refinements is used to represent the system at different abstraction levels. With the support of Rodin platform, the consistency of two levels of refinement could be verified by using automated mathematical proof [2]. This project aims to develop weak memory models formally within multiprocessor shared-memory systems in Event-b and to evaluate performance of systems with weak memory models.
References: [1] Neil Storey, Safety-Critical Computer Systems, Pearson Education Limited, Bath, UK,1996 [2] Event-B,http://www.event-b.org/
Primary investigators
- fl1e08
- jlc05r
Secondary investigator
Associated research group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2008-
- Themes:
- Low-Energy Sustainable Systems, Systems Design
With CMOS transistor size scaling leakage power consumption becomes an increasing problem for electronics system design. Mobile devices spend most of their time in idle mode. Idle circuit power consumption has high impact on the battery life of these devices, which will limit their applications. Low power design techniques such as power gating and supply voltage scaling were proposed to reduce leakage power. However these techniques introduce noises to a system and makes it more susceptible to errors. There are three important design parameters in an pervasive system: performance, power consumption and reliability. Higher performance enables more sophisticated applications, low power consumption prolongs the battery life and high reliability is a necessary requirement for critical tasks. The aim of this project is to provide low cost and effective circuit design techniques to improve the reliability of low power designs.
Primary investigator
- sy08r
Secondary investigators
- Professor David Flynn
- Bashir Al-Hashimi
- Dr. Harry Oldham
- Sachin Idgunji
Partner
- ARM
Associated research groups
- Pervasive Systems Centre
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2007-
- Themes:
- Healthcare, Wireless Sensing and Sensor Networks, Healthcare in ECS
- Funding:
- EPSRC
Recent advancements in wireless communication and wireless sensor network have opened up significant opportunity in futuristic healthcare and heath monitoring system development. Using sophisticated sensors and the wireless communication infrastructure monitoring a patient on a continuous basis will be feasible in the future. Typically such a system can be viewed as a layered structure consisting of 1) intelligent sensors layer, 2) network layer and 3) service layer. In the first layer a set of sensors (wearable or environmental) are deployed for collecting the vital signs of the patient under monitoring. These collected data are transmitted via the network layer to a central facility. WLAN/cellular/GSM/3G network could be used for serving this purpose. In the service layer the central facility processes these data to check for any abnormality of the received vital sign signals and accordingly the appropriate healthcare service is informed to take immediate action. Although very effective this structure faces the problem of transmission of huge amount of data over the network layer and effective management of the data at the central facility. The quality of transmitted medical data cannot be compromised by any means by using compression techniques since this may lead to false information about the condition of the patient under monitoring. Thus the main research effort has been dedicated to improve the quality and bandwidth in the network layer. Additionally maintenance of the data in the central facility needs intelligent database development.
We envisage that a way out is to add intelligent processing circuitry in the sensor layer itself which can monitor the patientââ¬â¢s vital signs on a continuous basis and only transmit the signal to the central facility when it finds a departure of the vital signââ¬â¢s pattern from the regular pattern. The raw medical data can be stored in a local computer using home wireless infrastructure. This approach reduces the burden on the network layer significantly. If required, the central facility can call for the raw data stored in the home computer over the network layer. However, processing the vital signs on a continuous basis is an extremely challenging problem in signal processing. Although there are several techniques developed for processing these data, they are very much computationally intensive and thus require significant amount of power. But in a wireless sensor network the biggest problem is the power and area. Thus these techniques are not likely to be suitable for embedding the associated circuitry within the sensor layer. To materialise our envisaged system, it is necessary to reduce the complexity of the required signal processing tasks (ââ¬Ålight-weight signal processingââ¬?) and associated architectural optimisation in such a way that each of the processing circuit consumes as small power as possible. In the extreme case we envisage that the circuits may work through energy harvesting.
Keeping this fact in mind we have initiated a research project for development of signal processing algorithms and associated ultra low-power architecture development for separating ââ¬Åaââ¬? vital sign signal from composite of similar kind of signals. This is a typical scenario when environmental sensors are used to monitor a patient who is visited by his/her relatives/friends. In this case the environmental sensor will receive a composite signal of several similar kinds of vital sign signals from which the circuit embedded in the sensor need to separate the only ââ¬Ånecessaryââ¬? signal corresponding to the person under monitoring. Since the person under monitoring can be mobile (within the room) it also needs to track the person on a continuous basis. The main challenge in this case is to find a clever algorithm of reduced complexity and associated ultra low-power architecture development.
We would like to continue this work in this area since this leads to joint algorithm-circuit optimisation which eventually enables us to develop ââ¬Årealââ¬? pervasive healthcare system satisfying the stringent criteria of ââ¬Åpervasivenessââ¬?.
Primary investigator
- aa07r
Secondary investigators
Associated research groups
- Pervasive Systems Centre
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Date:
- 2010-2010
- Themes:
- Digital Libraries, Web Science
- Funding:
- JISC
Open Impact is a project to help collect evidence about the impact of research that has been undertaken in UK universities and to provide it to a range of stakeholders (government, funders, press etc) through an independent third party agency (a learned society). The project focuses on a specific discipline (Computer Science) mediated through a particular society (the British Computer Society). In particular, this project will produce software that helps to make institutional repositories effective in collecting evidence of the impact of their institutionsââ¬â¢ research ââ¬â evidence that justifies the investment that government and research funders have made and that promotes the role of Universities in society.
Primary investigators
Partner
- British Computer Society
Associated research group
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group
- Date:
- 2010-2010
- Theme:
- Innovation in Science, Engineering and Technology Education
- Funding:
- JISC
Developments in ePortfolios enable greater power and flexibility in displaying achievements. Current initiatives side-step the problem of inter-institutional certification rather than dealing with it. Although proprietary solutions are starting to appear, they tend to be organisation- rather than user- centric.
This project seeks to address the issue of design for a suitable user-centric "eCertificate" system by working with representatives of the community to establish use case scenarios, to verify this design by building a demonstrator, and then by testing the demonstrator within the group. The demonstrator will be based on a code library which will be developed, and both will be placed in the public domain.
Primary investigator
Secondary investigators
- lcw07r
- tg2
- Gary Wills
- Lester Gilbert
- Andrew Gravell
Associated research groups
- Learning Societies Lab
- Electronic and Software Systems
- Date:
- 2009-
- Themes:
- Wireless Networking, Multimedia Source Compression, Pervasive Computing and Networks, Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks, Novel Sensors, Healthcare in ECS, Pervasive Healthcare and Telemedicine, Low-Energy Sustainable Systems
Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks (BAWSNs) have numerous applications. These typically involve the sensing of physiological data in a number of sensor nodes placed at various points on the body, the communication of this data to a central node and the use of intelligence algorithms to make decisions on the basis of the data. The sensor nodes are required to be small and light, preventing the use of bulky batteries. In order to maximise the length of time for which the sensor nodes can operate without requiring recharging, their energy consumption must be minimised. There are two main causes of sensor node energy consumption, namely the processing of data and the transmission of data. Clearly, reducing the amount of data that is processed and transmitted by a node can be reduce the energy consumption. However, there is typically a trade-off between the amount of data that is processed by a node and the amount of data that it transmits. For example, distributed intelligence and compression algorithms can be used to reduce the amount of data that is transmitted by a node, at the cost of increasing the amount of data processing performed. Furthermore, the contributions of sensing, communication and intelligence are inherently linked. For example, distributed intelligence algorithms require the communication of data between the sensor nodes that are involved in making decisions. Therefore this project aims to jointly consider the sensing, communication and intelligence of BAWSNs in order to strike attractive trade-offs between the processing and communication requirements of sensor nodes.
Primary investigator
- nw7g08
Secondary investigators
Associated research groups
- Pervasive Systems Centre
- Electronic Systems and Devices Group
- Electronics and Electrical Engineering
- Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group