ECE Seminar: Tommaso Melodia

The Internet of Medical Things: Toward Implantable Ultrasonic Sensor Networks
Tuesday, March 13, 11:45 a.m.
Larsen 234

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Abstract

Wireless networks of electronically controlled implantable medical sensors and actuators could be the basis of many innovative and potentially revolutionary therapies. The biggest obstacle in realizing this vision of networked implants is posed by the dielectric nature of the human body, which strongly attenuates radio-frequency electromagnetic waves used in traditional wireless technologies.

This talk will give an overview of ongoing research at Northeastern University exploring a
radically different approach, i.e., establishing wireless networked systems in human tissues that transfer data and energy through acoustic waves at ultrasonic frequencies. We will start off by discussing applications of networked implantable medical systems. We will then analyze fundamental aspects of ultrasonic propagation in human tissues and their impact on the design of wireless networking protocols at different layers of the protocol stack. We will then discuss our work on designing and prototyping the first ultrasonic Internet-of-Things platform through a closed-loop combination of mathematical modeling, simulation, and experimental evaluation.

Biography

Tommaso Melodia is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2007. He is an IEEE Fellow, a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award and of several best paper awards. He is the Director of Research for the PAWR Project Office, a $100M public-private partnership to establish 4 city-scale platforms for wireless research to advance the US wireless ecosystem in years to come. He is the Technical Program Committee Chair for IEEE Infocom 2018, and serves in the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Biological, Molecular, and Multi-Scale Communications.

His research on modeling, optimization, and experimental evaluation of Internet-of-Things and wireless networked systems is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, DARPA, and the Army Research Laboratory.