IEEE Sapporo Section
About Academic Lecture
Date: 13:00 to 15:10, Monday, September 25, 2010Location: Conference Room, eleventh floor, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University
Title: Wireless Sensors Networks: Challenges and Opportunities
Lecturer: Prof. Magdy A. Bayoumi, Dr., Director, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, U.S.A.
Outline: Computers, communication, and sensing technologies are converging to change the way we live, interact, and conduct business. Wireless sensor networks reflect such convergence. These networks are based on collaborative efforts of a large number of sensor nodes. They should be low-cost, low-power, and multifunction. These nodes have the capabilities of sensing, data processing, and communicating. Sensor networks have a wide range of applications, from monitoring sensors in industrial facilities to control and management of energy applications to military and security fields. Because of the special features of these networks, new network technologies are needed for cost effective, low power, and reliable communication. These network protocols and architectures should take into consideration the special features of sensor networks such as: the large number of nodes, their failure rate, limited power, high density, etc. In this talk the impact of wireless sensor networks will be addressed, several of the design and communication issues will be discussed, and a case study of a current project of using such networks in drilling and management off-shore oil and natural gas in the gulf region will be given.
Title: Development of a wireless body area network platform for implantable medical applications
Lecturer: Prof. Eryk Dutkiewicz, Dr., Department of Electronic Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Outline: The growing cost of healthcare and the aging population in developed countries have introduced great challenges for governments, healthcare providers and healthcare industry. There is great interest in using emerging wireless technologies to support remote patient monitoring in an unobtrusive, reliable and cost effective manner thereby providing personalized sustainable services to patients. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is one such emerging technology that has the potential to significantly improve health care delivery, diagnostic monitoring, disease-tracking and related medical procedures. A crucial aspect of WBANs is their ability to provide high reliability communication between medical devices, especially those implanted in the human body. In this presentation we describe research activities into WBANs at Macquarie University. The central activity is focused on the development of a WBAN platform for implantable medical applications. The platform consists of small communications and sensing modules and a solid human body phantom. We also describe our work on the development of a low power WBAN medium access control protocol and on interference mitigation in WBANs using a game theory approach. One of the aims of the WBAN platform is to facilitate experimentation and testing of these protocols and approaches in a realistic setting. These protocols and associated mechanisms will be tested in an animal laboratory at the University’s medical department.