Sensors and Embedded Systems: CITRIS Project

Autonomous and Interactive Systems at UC Merced has broad applications and focuses on the extremely important capability that intelligent systems have to achieve in order to be inserted in society: the ability to autonomously act with, and/or in cooperation with, people. The projects focus on systems that can be used to train and assist people in preparation for or during complex and difficult situations.

Since 2007, MRI has become a recommended screening study for the millions of pre- menopausal American women. However, breast MRI has two technical challenges. Poor fat suppression in MRI obscures some tumors. Also poor registration of the breast between annual MRI scans makes it difficult to determine whether a suspicious lesion is actually growing too fast, or is simply a different lesion. We have completed the proof-of-concept laboratory testing of an inexpensive, novel composite PG-foam padding material that will solve both of these problems.

The objective of this project will be the creation of smart devices that promote awareness and understanding of personal activity spaces and how they affect health.

This is a project to assess how water resources can be enhanced during managed aquifer recharge, with a focus on water supply and improvements to water quality through denitrification. This project will help to develop tools and methods that can be applied broadly, in many settings, and will address topics of primary importance to the state of California.

The need for language aids is pervasive in today's world. Millions of individuals with language and speech challenges require additional support for language understanding and learning. Currently, however, these needs are not being met because there are not enough skilled teachers, interpreters, and professionals to give them the one on one attention that they need.

The goal of our project is to design and develop small-scale biosensors that incorporate airway pithelial cells to detect airborne pollutants. The design of these biosensors will be based on microfluidic devices. The deliverable of the project will be a working prototype for the future production of highly sensitive and portable devices for the detection of harmful airborne agents. Upon successful completion of this project, there are many exciting potential applications for these biosensors including the detection of warfare agents.

Healthcare is a $2 Trillion/year industry which amounts to 16% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. These numbers are expected to rapidly rise as the aging baby boomers will continue to increase the elderly age group population (people above 60 years of age) from the current 10% level to the 25% level in 2030. While the advances in hardware and software technologies for healthcare services have been remarkable, networking remains as the main hurdle in delivering much needed modern healthcare services in a timely and cost-effective manner.

It is projected that the senior population in the U.S. will grow to 72 million by 2030 which will represent 20% of the total population [He et al., 2005]. Because the impact of institutional care is extremely high in terms of the monetary cost, health, and happiness of seniors, health care at home using assistive technology has recently received much attention. The use of computer and information technology will improve the quality of living while reducing the overall health care cost.

SIMI is a proof-of-feasibility project that combines state-of-the-art satellite and radar data image processing with real-time data from ground solar stations in order to determine solar energy availability for the atmospheric conditions found in California. The web-based, near real-time information database generated by SIMI will provide a direct estimate of both current and prospective power availability for solar-based technologies in the state of California.

The burden of infectious diseases is very high in developing countries. World-wide, nearly 1 million die annually from malaria, 2.9 million from enteric (intestinal) infections, 4.3 million from respiratory infections, and 5 million from AIDS and tuberculosis. Unfortunately, most methods for diagnosing these diseases are invasive, labor intensive, and sometimes inadequate.

Doctors currently diagnose many neurological diseases by observing the gait of a patient; however, many patients feel uncomfortable in the medical surroundings and do not behave naturally. To remove this obstacle to diagnose, CITRIS researchers are developing an automated diagnostic system that will enable various gait and movement disorders to be quantitatively characterized. This system, which measures inertia, will allow patients to collect information at their home and at other locations that reflect their daily routine.

Because electricity cannot be practically or economically stored in large quantities, the electricity generation and distribution system must match supply and demand on a minute-by-minute basis. Delivery of electricity for residential use has traditionally been done by matching the supply to the demand, with little or no control over the demand. This causes severe distortions in the system operation and economics when the demand hits unusually high peak values.

Pollution due to atmospheric particulates is a major cause of respiratory illnesses such as asthma particularly in California’s Central Valley which contains five of the ten most polluted cities in the United States. Real-time monitoring of the size and density of airborne particles is important for providing health advisories. Traditional monitoring techniques provide only sparse, localized measurements. This proposal seeks seed funding to investigate terrestrial remote sensing as a novel low-cost wide-coverage alternate to current approaches for monitoring atmospheric particulates.

Large scale incidents, whether natural such as the Katrina disaster, tsunamis, and earthquakes, or human-caused such as the WTC incident, are becoming more frequent and more problematic.

Future biomedical implants with extended wireless connectivity will form the bottom layer of a future intelligent health care delivery infrastructure. In addition to providing therapy through electrical stimulation and drug delivery, implants will provide uploading diagnostic information to clinicians and downloading of customized therapeutic algorithms to enable personalized medicine.

Task 1: Next Generation Network Architecture and Protocol Studies
Berkeley team, together with Davis team, will design next generation network architectures and protocols, and conduct comparative simulation studies on the designed protocols and architectures in terms of performance, robustness, and scalability.