Tutorial 10: Signal Processing in Body Sensor Networks

Presented by

Balakrishnan Prabhakaran

Abstract

Recently, Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) are being deployed for monitoring and managing medical conditions as well as human performance in sports. These BSNs include various sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, EMG (Electro myograms), EKG (Electro-cardiograms), and other sensors depending on the needs of the medical conditions. Data from these sensors are typically Time Series data and the data from multiple sensors form multiple, multidimensional time series data. Analyzing data from such multiple medical sensors pose several challenges: different sensors have different characteristics, different people generate different patterns through these sensors, and even for the same person the data can vary widely depending on time and environment.

Body Sensor Networks (BSN) data has several similarities to other multimedia data. BSN data may have both discrete and continuous components, with or without real-time requirements. The data can be voluminous. Continuous BSN data may need signal processing techniques for recognition and interpretation.

This tutorial describes the technologies that go behind BSNs – both in terms of the hardware infrastructure as well as the basic software. First, we outline the BSN hardware features and the related requirements. We then discuss the energy and communication choices for BSNs. Next, we discuss approaches for classification, data mining, visualization, and securing these data. We also show several demonstrations of body sensor networks as well as the software that aid in analyzing the data.

Speaker Biography

Dr. B. Prabhakaran is an Associate Professor with the faculty of Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Dallas. He has been working in the area of multimedia systems: animation & multimedia databases, authoring & presentation, resource management, and scalable web-based multimedia presentation servers. Dr. Prabhakaran received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases. He is also the Principal Investigator for US Army Research Office (ARO) grant on 3D data storage, retrieval, and delivery. He has published more than 100 research papers in various refereed conferences and journals in this area.

He has served as an Associate Chair of the ACM Multimedia Conferences in 2006 (Santa Barbara), 2003 (Berkeley, CA), 2000 (Los Angeles, CA), and in 1999 (Orlando, FL). He has served as guest-editor of special issues on various topics for different multimedia journals. He is also serving on the editorial board of journals such as Multimedia Systems (Springer), Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer), Journal of Multimedia (Academy Publishers), and Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (Information Resources Management Association (IRMA)). He is also the Editor-in-chief of the ACM SIGMM (Special Interest Group on Multimedia) Online magazine and is also a member of the SIGMM Executive Council. He has also served as program committee member on several multimedia conferences and workshops. He has presented tutorials in ACM Multimedia and other multimedia conferences. Dr Prabhakaran has served as a visiting research faculty with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park. He also served as a faculty in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore as well as in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.