26th July 2007

What people have come to expect in cell phones and personal communicators may soon become common in health-care devices and products at home and in medical offices, thanks to new technology announced today by the University of Florida and IBM.

The technology creates the first-ever roadmap for widespread commercial development of “smart” devices that, for example, take a person’s blood pressure, temperature or respiration rate the minute a person steps into his or her house – then transmit it immediately and automatically to doctors or family.

That could eliminate the need for many doctor’s visits, which are often difficult for the elderly or sick. By enabling regular updates via text message or e-mail, the technology also could pave the way for people to share real-time information on their health or well-being with absent loved ones. And it could prove useful for doctors who need to keep tabs on many patients at one time by helping the doctors to prioritize whom to treat first.

“We call it quality-of-life engineering,” said Sumi Helal, professor of computer engineering and the project’s lead UF researcher. “It’s really a change of mindset.”

“UF and IBM both see the need and the opportunity to integrate the physical world of sensors and other devices directly into enterprise systems,” said Richard Bakalar, Chief Medical Officer for IBM. “Doing so in an open environment will remove market inhibitors that impede innovation in critical industries like health care and open a broader device market that’s fueled by uninterrupted networking.”

Helal has devoted the past several years to developing smart devices for the elderly in a model home known as the “Gator Tech Smart Home” in Gainesville.

Helal feels the current generation of devices have a major shortcoming: They require “a team of engineers” to install them, he said. In a world where consumers are accustomed to electronics that require no more than a power outlet, that dramatically limits their appeal. “We decided to create a technology that self integrates,” Helal said. “When you bring it in to the house and plug it in, it automatically provides its service and finds a path to the outside world.”

With $60,000 in research funding from IBM, Helal designed “middleware,” or software and hardware that glues together different systems, that can give his and any similar health-aid devices this independence and connectivity. Importantly, the software is based on open standards, or publicly available specifications useable by anyone, such as those now being made available by consortiums of technology companies including Eclipse, W3C and OSGi.

Open standards make it easy for product developers to tap the technology in any new smart assistive devices, Helal said. That, in turn, will make the devices more common.

The hardware component of the system is an inexpensive sensor platform about half the size of a business card. Developed at UF and licensed to Pervasa, a Gainesville-based UF spinoff company headed by Helal, the “Atlas” platform makes it easy to create a network of sensors and make their information available on a computer network.

University of Florida also announced work it is carrying out on devices that can interpret signals in the brain and stimulate neurons to perform correctly, advances that might someday make it possible for a tiny computer to fix diseases or even allow a paralyzed person to control a prosthetic device with his thoughts.

Using a $2.5 million grant received this year from the National Institutes of Health, UF researchers from the College of Medicine, the College of Engineering and the McKnight Brain Institute have teamed up to create a “neuroprosthetic” chip designed to be implanted in the brain. It is hoped that such devices could correct conditions such as paralysis or epilepsy.

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