NARRATIVE ON RESEARCH/CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

 

The realization of IoT wireless connectivity is bringing fundamental changes to communications and computing and profoundly affects the way we compute, communicate, and interact. It provides fully distributed and ubiquitous computing and communications, thus bringing an end to the tyranny of geography. The IoT wireless and mobile networks are quickly becoming the networks of choice, not only because of the large bandwidth but due to the flexibility and freedom they offer.

 

My interdisciplinary research interest includes the design, analysis, and deployment of the following.

1. Network and Communication Sciences

2. Health Informatics

3. Data/Customer Analytics and Information Systems

4. Churn Prediction

5. Network Security

6. Machine and Deep Learning

7. IoT & Social Internet

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Current and Future Research Agenda

 

Health Informatics

With the rapid advancements of wireless communication and semiconductor technologies such as wearable, health monitoring, etc., the area of sensor networks has grown significantly by altering the future of healthcare services and enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a special-purpose sensor network designed to operate autonomously by connecting various independent medical nodes (e.g., sensors and actuators) situated in the clothes, stick on the human body, or under the skin. These nodes are spanned and scattered all over the human body and connected via a wireless communication channel using a star or multi-hop topology.

In many developed countries, the healthcare systems are currently confronting an increase in the number of people diagnosed with chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. These chronic illnesses are not simply a result of an aging population but are due to inappropriate diet, sedentary lifestyle and insufficient physical activity. Consequently, the need to provide quality care and service in these countries for a rapidly growing population of elderly people, while reducing the health care costs, is of paramount importance for governments and health service providers. Wearable and implantable body sensor network systems are apparatus to achieve this objective, (i.e., a prominent application in this area is the integration of sensing and consumer electronics technologies, in order to continuously monitor people during their daily activities). Standardized hardware and software architectures can support compatible devices, which are expected to significantly affect the next generation of healthcare systems. Some of these devices can then be incorporated into the WBAN, providing new opportunities for technology to monitor health status.

In our second Health Informatics project, we are implementing a more medically intuitive clinical decision support system that helps physicians, patients, and caregivers to manage Alzheimer’s disease. The proposed system will save lots of resources spent annually to diagnose, treat, and monitor Alzheimer patients globally and especially in the UAE. Furthermore, the proposed system will be medically oriented in the system design and extend the state-of-art techniques of machine learning and deep learning.

To sum up, the criticality of this project can be summarized in the following points:

1. Building a patient-centric and web-based recommendation system to help Alzheimer’s patients manage their disease and predict their future conditions.

2. Designing and implementing medically trustful and personalized clinical decision support systems to help physicians automatically manage and monitor Alzheimer’s disease patients.

3. Designing and implementing a real-time patient monitoring system to continuously provide assistance to Alzheimer’s patients.

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