Mobile medical sensor devices are rapidly emerging as one promising way to monitor patient health (and the quality of patient care) while improving convenience to the patient (and reducing the cost of care) by allowing patients to spend more time out of the hospital. Today, thousands of patients already use technology at home to communicate with healthcare staff and to measure and report health data.
In the future, mobile sensors could keep track of everyday behaviors that are reflective of physical and physiological health states and predictive of future health problems. We expect that wearable, portable, and even embeddable sensors will overcome some of the challenges of existing approaches and enable long-term continuous medical monitoring for many purposes: for outpatients with chronic medical conditions (such as diabetes), individuals seeking to change behavior (such as losing weight), physicians needing to quantify and detect behavioral aberrations for early diagnosis (such as depression), or athletes wishing to monitor their condition and performance.
This research thread addresses fundamental security challenges related to collection, processing, and medical use of data from sensors worn by outpatients. With a patient-centric point of view, we focus on two critical issues of concern to the patient: privacy and usability. The challenge is to provide usable devices that respect patient privacy while also retaining data quality and accessibility required for the medical purpose it serves.
Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury and David Kotz, "Activity-aware ECG-based patient authentication for remote health monitoring", Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and Workshop on Machine Learning for Multi-modal Interaction (ICMI-MLMI), Cambridge, MA, November 2-4, 2009.
Tanzeem Choudhury is interviewed about mHealth research she is conducting with Professor Andrew Campbell (Computer Science) and Dr. Ethan Berke (Dartmouth Medical School). Listen to the interview here:
Team
The TISH mHealth team is led by Principal Investigator Professor David Kotz (Computer Science). The team also includes Senior Programmer Ron Peterson, PhD student Aarathi Prasad, PhD student Cory Cornelius, MS student Rima Murthy, undergraduate students Emma Smithayer '12 and Zach Marois '12. ISTS Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Sorber and PhD student Shrirang Mare conduct related mHealth research on the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) effort. Tanzeem Choudhury (now Associate Professor in the Information Science Department at Cornell University) co-led this research thread for the first two years of the project.
The TISH mHealth team is led by Principal Investigator Professor David Kotz (Computer Science). The team also includes Senior Programmer Ron Peterson, PhD student Aarathi Prasad, PhD student Cory Cornelius, MS student Rima Murthy, undergraduate students Emma Smithayer '12 and Zach Marois '12. ISTS Postdoctoral Fellow Jacob Sorber and PhD student Shrirang Mare conduct related mHealth research on the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) effort. Tanzeem Choudhury (now Associate Professor in the Information Science Department at Cornell University) co-led this research thread for the first two years of the project.