Professor and Palmer Department Chair Ashfaq Khokhar, of Iowa State University‘s Electrical and Computer Engineering department (ECpE), was a keynote speaker at the 8th ACM Workshop on Pervasive Wireless Healthcare Workshop (MobileHealth 2018), held in conjunction with the Nineteenth International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHoc 2018), June 25-28 in Los Angeles. The workshop focused on exploring research challenges that arise in deployment of smart sensors and mobile communication environments to revolutionize healthcare.
Khokhar’s keynote, entitled “Smart Health Care Systems using Anonymized Avatars of Internet of Things (IoTs),” focused on both the challenges and opportunities of implementing a cyber physical system to allow anonymized collection of wellness and sickness data in clinics, hospital rooms and patients’ homes.
“Today’s modern healthcare delivery systems have been mainly designed to work with the onslaught of an illness, and logging of information into Electronic Health Record Systems, related to symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, etcetera, is initiated with the illness,” Khokhar wrote in his talk’s abstract. “There is hardly any data collected during the wellness phase of a person. Furthermore, access to the data stored in such systems for the purpose of analyses involves complicated manual processes, and the related access policies make it extremely difficult to perform analytics.”
Analyses of such data has the potential to transform healthcare practices and improve quality of life. His talk discussed the design of miniature smart wireless sensors and communication technologies to ubiquitously monitor health and anonymously share the collected data using intelligent user interfaces, thus improving healthcare delivery.
According to Khokhar, this was an excellent opportunity to showcase wireless smart sensors and mobile communications work done in ECpE at ISU, and it provided great visibility. This multidisciplinary work involves researchers and scientists from Iowa State University and John Hopkins University.