When you think of sensors being in your home, your mind more than likely drifts to motion sensors, light sensors, or even fire alarms, but an expert team at UM is developing a concept beyond mainstream smart home technology—one that can change the way we live our everyday lives.

It may have been hard to imagine in a pre-pandemic world, but as a result of the ever-evolving smart technologies researchers developed, a home technology-empowered “smart home health hub” is closer than you can imagine.

At the fourth annual and first virtual Smart Cities Miami 2021 Conference (held on April 15, 2021), co-hosted by the School of Architecture and the Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC), Rodolphe el-Khoury, Dean of the School of Architecture, led a session titled “University of Miami Innovation Showcase,” which featured the work of an interdisciplinary team that is confronting some of the challenges and opportunities presented by COVID-19.

“The project we’re sharing today is in line with previous efforts we’ve presented, but this model is an interconnectivity of all scales,” said Dean el-Khoury. “It will involve the clinic, the hospital, the pharmacy, and of course, the home, which we see as an extension of the clinic and the primary site of healthcare.”

The work in progress reinvents the current hospital model by modifying it as a dispersed network that will include the home. The cutting-edge concept, described as a technology-empowered smart home health hub, can turn your living space into an interactive, mixed-reality experience that can connect you to your physician in seconds.

“It’s the microcosm of the entire system because it encapsulates and concentrates four main functions: monitoring, treating, communicating, and data analysis,” said el-Khoury. “We think of it as the Swiss Army knife of sensors, jampacked with everything we are already developing. It can be customized and connected to appliances you already may have.”

The Innovation Showcase team members included Rodolphe el-Khoury, Dean of the School of Architecture and Program Director of IDSC Smart Cities; Nicholas Tsinoremas, Vice Provost for Research Computing and Data and Founding Director of IDSC; Sylvia Daunert, the Lucille P. Markey Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Miller School of Medicine; Sapna Deo, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Miller School of Medicine; Leonidas Bachas, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Yelena Yesha, Innovation Officer and Head of International Relations for IDSC.

“Healthcare is moving towards the home,” said IDSC Director Nick Tsinoremas, who looks forward to continuing to develop the prototype and working with partners outside of the University. “This is an opportunity to have a ‘candy store’ of all the data in one place if you will.”

Dr. Yelena Yesha, who is also a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and an expert in healthcare cybersecurity, said the new smart home health hub is not meant to replace care or medical professionals but is “bridging the gap between providing healthcare in the remote environment versus having it in the physical environment.” “This is will be an opportunity to infuse the data so that we can seamlessly, in real-time, analyze this data and make sense of it,” said Dr, Yesha, who’s aware of the need for patient consent of this new technology. “We want to build intelligence to assist the medical professional.”

The three-hour Conference featured participants from government, academia, and private industry who each shared how smart city technology can be used to solve issues around the pandemic and healthcare. The Conference kicked off with a welcome message from University of Miami Provost Jeffrey Duerk, followed by Keynote Speaker Michael Mylrea, Senior Technical Advisor to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s (UMBC) Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA), who discussed blockchain technology and cybersecurity surrounding data collection.

The first panel, Session 1, was entitled “Healthcare in the Smart City” and included Moderator: Yelena Yesha, panelists Jeb Linton, Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM; Pamela Tomski, Analytics Advisor and Energy/CCUS Expert at SAS; Pierre-François D’Haese, CEO, Neurotargeting; Mic Bowman, Sr. Principal Engineer, Intel Labs; and Frank Ricotta, CEO & Founder of BurstIQ.

Plenary Keynote Speaker Mark Wolff, Chief Health Analytics Strategist for the SAS Institute (an international data analytics firm) shared his experiences in healthcare and how the internet of medical things (IoMT) and edge analytics are shifting the overall health care sector.

The Conference also allowed professionals the chance to meet other leaders in the field, and to share knowledge about practices in place today that are making cities more digitally connected than ever.

In closing, Dr. Tsinoremas and Dr. Yesha underscored how important having a smart home health hub will be for individuals in a post-pandemic world.

“The integration of state-of-the-art technologies, with the data acquisition and handling done in a protective way, and then being able to communicate with the physician and the healthcare providers in a seamless way is a totally novel concept that does not exist,” said Yesha. “We have the Fitbits of this world and the Apple Watch that will tell us some information, but it is not like a holistic, total approach like the smart homehealth hub will have. We are going one step further.”

 

SOURCE:  NEWS@TheU by Ashley A. Williams