The objective of this project is to create a focused cyber-physical design environment to accelerate the development of miniature medical devices in general and swallowable systems in particular. The project develops new models and tools including a web-based integrated simulation environment,capturing the interacting dynamics of the computational and physical components of devices designed to work inside the human body, to enable wider design space exploration, and, ultimately, to lower the barriers which have thus far impeded system engineering of miniature medical devices. Currently, a few select individuals with deep domain expertise create these systems. The goal is to open this field to a wider community and at the same time create better designs through advanced tool support. The project defines a component model and corresponding domain-specific modeling language to provide a common framework for design capture, design space exploration, analysis and automated synthesis of all hardware and software artifacts. The project also develops a rich and extensible component and design template library that designers can reuse. The online design environment will provide early feedback and hence, it will lower the cost of experimentation with alternatives. The potential benefit is not just incremental (in time and cost), but can lead to novel ideas by mitigating the risk of trying unconventional solutions. Trends in consumer electronics such as miniaturization, low power operation, and wireless technologies have enabled the design of miniature devices that hold the potential to revolutionize medicine. Transformational societal public health benefits (e.g., early diagnosis of colorectal cancer or prevention of heart failure) are possible through less invasive and more accurate diagnostic and interventional devices. By eliminating large incisions in favor of natural orifices or small ports, these medical devices can increase diagnostic screening effectiveness and reduce pain and recovery time. Furthermore, if successful, the proposed scientific approach can be extended to any other application, wherever size, power efficiency, and high confidence are stringent requirements. The educational plan of the project is centered on the web-based design environment that will also contain an interface for high school students to experiment with medical cyber-physical devices in a virtual environment. Students will be able to build medical devices from a library of components, program them using an intuitive visual programming language and operate them in various simulated environments. A Summer Camp organized in the framework of this project will enhance students learning experience with real hands-on experimentation in a lab.

Wireless body area sensing networks (WBANs) have the potential to revolutionize health care in the near term and enhance other application domains including sports, entertainment, military and emergency situations. These WBANs represent a novel cyber-physical system that unites engineering systems, the natural world and human individuals. The coupling of bio-sensors with a wireless infrastructure enables the real-time monitoring of an individual's health, environment and related behaviors continuously, as well as the provision of real-time feedback with nimble, adaptive, and personalized interventions. Recent technological advances in low power integrated circuits, signal processing and wireless communications have enabled the design of tiny, low cost, lightweight, intelligent medical devices, sensors and networking platforms that have the potential to make the concept of truly pervasive wireless sensor networks a reality. To develop the WBANs of the future, this breakthrough research will pursue the interfaces of sensing, communication and control. This project aims to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision-making and control for health monitoring application of wireless body area networks. In these systems, sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed and communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes. All of these operations must be carried out in the presence of constraints on power and energy resources at the sensors, limited communication and computational abilities and with low end-to-end delay between the sensing of information to its eventual utilization. In this project, a global (end-to end) perspective is adopted that optimizes network operation to improve the information quality and enhance the lifetime of the network, focusing in particular on optimal use of sensor resources such as energy, new sensing and communication paradigms that balance information quality and energy expenditure, and real-time encoding and decoding methods that provide strict delay guarantees on information delivery. The proposed work will contribute to several research areas including optimal resource allocation at sensors, adaptive sensing methods, real-time encoding and decoding and event-based communication. The educational impact of the proposed research will come through the training of new information technology professionals and scientists with expertise in cross-disciplinary research, development of new courses based on the proposed research activity and continued efforts to include women and under-represented minorities in the research program.