Internet of the Body Platform - overview
Contextual understanding of human behavior is the key puzzle piece to providing personalized cognitive services. Today, only few of the required behavioral indicators are available to cognitive engines. To acquire this data, we need smart interfaces to “access humans”, the largest data source.
Personalized cognitive services will be relevant in many current and future markets, which represent a huge market. We also need a framework for better understanding and modeling human behavior by complementing global with local human context allows cognitive systems to operate in a more accurate and context-relevant manner.
Wearables that acquire relevant vital and contextual parameters improve work safety as well as quality of life of elderly citizens or patients with chronic diseases. A scalable architecture connects wearables via a hub to the cloud and combines edge with cloud computing to provide optimal user interaction and allow analytics on multi-stream data. The functionality enables demonstrations of physiological and psychological stress classification in firemen and mobile health interventions in patients with lung diseases. Following an initial table-top edge demonstrator a hemi-spherical display improves emotional contact to users.
A first phase of the IoB project demonstrated the basic capability of the sensor – edge – cloud integration using a low cost MVP1 edge platform and simple sensors (PPG sensors, ECG HR sensors, Temperature sensors). The target application was high-quality home care to implement the concept of a future hospital. After this phase a HQ demonstrator was created as an interface of IBM Watson Personal Assistant® to the people – combined with the capability to read wearable data and act upon the inputs. The high-quality showcase as well as the hearable improve the emotional contact to the patient.
In summary we have created an integrated system for human centric sensing and computing and have bridged the technology gap to wearables with edge systems that could apply AI in healthcare and IoT. Our effort is an important step to implement wearable sensing both in acute and chronic healthcare. But the goal is to develop methods to introduce preventive medicine tools based on long-term monitoring and coaching.
Our efforts in Human Centric Sensing and Computing will help to introduce AI in healthcare for time-based datasets. To extract insights, we will start building a contextual patient model. IoB is a strategic investment to create the foundation of future compute platforms that allow a seamless move of applications from cloud to edge to sensors. This will converge into future hierarchical operating systems that are not tied to a machine but distributed over different platforms.
Papers:
- Straessle et al. “Internet of the Body and Cognitive Hypervisor.” 2017 IEEE/ACM Int’l Conf. on Connected Health: Appl., Systems and Eng. Technol. (CHASE) (2017): 296-297.
- Straessle et al., “IoB and eCompanion Enabling High Quality Monitoring of Patients at Home”, Conf. on E-health Netw., Appl. & Serv, Oct.12-15, 2017, Dalian, China.
- Straessle et al., “Internet of the Body: Wearable Devices and Cognitive Computing for a Personal Medical Advisor”, EBMC July 21-23, 2018, Honolulu, HI, (Abstract and Poster).
- Brunschwiler, J. Weiss, S. Paredes, A. Sridhar, U. Pluntke, S. Mai Chau, S. Gerke, J. Barroso, E. Loertscher, Y. Temiz, P. Ruch, and B. Michel, S. Zafar, T. van Kessel, Keiji Matsumoto, “Internet of the Body - Wearable Monitoring and Coaching”, IoT Summit, June 17-21, 2019, Aarhus, Denmark.