Mobile System Design for Health-care Applications

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis 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 the 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:			Thursday, 16 August 2018

Time:			4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:			Room 3494
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Wenbo Wang (MARK)

Committee Members:	Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Kai Chen
 			Prof. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Jianan Qu (ECE)
 			Prof. Dan Wang (COMP, PolyU)


**** ALL are Welcome ****