PC3: Collaborative Research: Foundation for Trusted and Scalable Mobile Healthcare

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides funding for a collaborative project between Dartmouth College, Rice University and the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. Soon, technology for mobile health (mHealth) will enable individuals to wear one or more sensing devices to better monitor their health conditions, or enable rural health workers to make periodic visits to villages that may not have access to routine healthcare services. The investigators in this project are developing the scientific foundations for a modular kit of mHealth components -- portable, inexpensive, and usable by patients or healthcare workers with limited training -- that can be assembled into a variety of combinations for different circumstances or healthcare purposes. Scientifically, they are addressing two fundamental questions: (1) how to construct secure, self-aware sensors that can attest to the provenance of the sensor data and its context; (2) how to design a system for computational triage that can provide real-time on-site feedback to the patient, avoiding the need for every patient visit, every data point, to be examined by skilled health professionals. The intellectual merit of this project is in (1) developing a new breed of portable medical sensors with the intelligence to identify and securely attest to the origin and quality of the data, and (2) developing computational triage algorithms that guide individual subjects to a medical facility when tests reveal a high chance of potential health problems. The research should result in broader impacts including (1) technology that could radically improve preventive health, (2) students trained on healthcare technologies in a wider global context, and (3) technologies that will have applications beyond healthcare, such as in critical infrastructure monitoring. This project is part of the Pervasive Communications and Computing Collaboration (PC3) initiative.