Bringing Sensing to the Masses: An Exploration in Infrastructure Mediated Sensing
Shwetak Patel (Georgia Tech)
Colloquium
Thursday, April 17, 2008, 3:30 pm
EEB-105
Abstract
The use of sensing systems in the home has the potential to impact various research areas such as chronic care management, aging in place, and sustainability. A major challenge remains in identifying and developing truly ubiquitous sensing solutions that address deployment challenges of cost-effectiveness, installation, maintenance, and overall acceptability for a general audience. In the home, the goal of practical ubiquity had led me to develop a new sensing approach, which I call "Infrastructure Mediated Sensing," or IMS. Infrastructure mediation refers to the simple augmentation and probing of existing home infrastructure, such as the electrical power lines, plumbing, or HVAC systems, to sense human activity. I will present three different IMS systems I have built that leverage the electrical and HVAC systems in a home for the purposes of location tracking and activity detection. I will describe an in-depth study of home mobility patterns enabled by an IMS-based positioning system, as well as motivate a wide variety of other applications this sensing approach enables. I will also describe research opportunities in exploring IMS outside of the domestic space.
Bio:
Shwetak N. Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is a member of the Ubiquitous Computing Research group, serves as the assistant director of the Aware Home Research Initiative, and is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research is in the area of Ubiquitous Computing with a particular emphasis on developing and applying new low-cost, easy-to-use hardware and software solutions to enable novel application deployment and evaluation. Shwetak's published work has received various best paper awards and nominations. His past work on camera detection and neutralization received the designation of a Top Technology Idea of the Year from New York Times Magazine in 2005. Shwetak's research has also been the basis of various commercialization efforts.