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Prolonged sitting and physical inactivity at workplace often lead to various health risks such as diabetes, heart attack, cancer etc. Many organizations are investing in wellness programs to ensure the well-being of their employees. Generally wearable devices are used in such wellness programs to detect health problems of employees, but studies have shown that wearables do not result in sustained adoption. Heart rate measurement has emerged as an effective tool to detect various ailments such as anxiety, stress, cardiovascular diseases etc. There are pre-existing techniques that use webcam feed to sense heart rate subject to some experimental constraints like stillness of face, light illumination etc. In this paper, we show that in-situ opportunities can be found and predicted for webcam based heart rate sensing in the workplace environment by analyzing data from unobtrusive sensors in a pervasive manner.

Body area networks (BANs) are networks of wireless sensors and medical devices embedded in clothing, worn on or implanted in the body, and have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by enabling pervasive healthcare. However, due to their critical applications affecting human health, challenges arise when designing them to ensure they are safe for the user, sustainable without requiring frequent battery replacements and secure from interference and malicious attacks. This book lays the foundations of how BANs can be redesigned from a cyber-physical systems perspective (CPS) to overcome these issues. Introducing cutting-edge theoretical and practical techniques and taking into account the unique environment-coupled characteristics of BANs, the book examines how we can re-imagine the design of safe, secure and sustainable BANs. It features real-world case studies, suggestions for further investigation and project ideas, making it invaluable for anyone involved in pervasive and mobile healthcare, telemedicine, medical apps and other cyber-physical systems.

Computing systems now monitor, coordinate, control, integrate and facilitate many physical processes from vehicle management and crisis response to managing data centers. Such systems, termed Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), can consist of three major components—(i) human inhabitants, (ii) physical environment and (iii) computing entities. Trustworthiness of the CPSs depends on how safe the physical environment is and how survivable the human inhabitants are in the environment. Safety and survivability require pro-active operations in the CPSs so that the conditions violating these properties are predicted and avoided. Pro-activity, however, generally causes undesirable resource consumption overhead. Further, the complex interactions among the physical environment and computing entities can cause additional overhead and uncertainty in pro-actively ensuring the safety and survivability. Thus, a synergistic design of pro-activity is required which considers such complex interactions. In this regard, synergistic planning and preparedness of crisis response, which is cyber-physical in nature, is performed to pro-actively avoid life losses during crises. To this effect, crisis response is modeled as a state-based, real-time stochastic system capturing the uncertainties due to human interactions. The research outcomes include a crisis preparedness tool using the industry standard Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) to specify and analyze the proposed stochastic model. Further, to avoid redline temperatures for equipment safety in a data center, which is another example of CPSs, cooling systems are pro-actively pre-set for worst-case thermal conditions; thus wasting cooling energy. This dissertation develops a set of energy-efficient data center job scheduling algorithms that consider the cooling behavior, computing equipment power characteristics, and its impact on the cooling demand to minimize the data center energy consumption. Lastly, pro-active routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs), the most common computing infrastructure for crisis response, maintain routes between any two nodes irrespective of data to transmit. This dissertation introduces autonomic tuning of the route update frequencies in such protocols to minimize the energy-overhead while maintaining the service reliability for information exchange. Further, self-managing routing protocols are developed to pro-actively construct energy-efficient routes in MANETs.

This chapter focuses on the various definitions, challenges, and approaches to BAN safety. Standard ISO 60601, a standard for medical devices, defines safety as the avoidance of unacceptable risks of hazards to the physical environment (i.e., to the patient) due to the operation of a medical device under normal or single-fault condition. Although this definition is akin to that for medical devices, it can be generally applicable to BANs as well, which are essentially networks of such devices. The standard further lists seven aspects of safety as follows.Operational aspect. This aspect considers safety as the correct (and error-free) operation of the medical device, which might involve software, hardware, and electrical and mechanical operations, as well as the usage of medical devices in clinical processes (or medical scenarios).Radiation aspect. This aspect of safety is geared towards ensuring that any radiation (e.g., X-ray radiation) from the device does not harm the patient.Thermal aspect. This aspect of safety concerns the need to ensure that any heat dissipated because of medical-device operation and power consumption does not burn any part of the patient's body.Biocompatibility. This aspect requires the materials used for the medical device to be compatible with the human body.Software aspect. This aspect is essentially covered under the operational aspect; however, with the proliferation of software-enabled devices and sensors, special emphasis has been placed on correct operation of device software (e.g., code consistency and execution flow).Mechanical aspect. This aspect principally requires that any actuation (e.g., the infusion process employed by an infusion pump) from the medical device does not cause harm to the body.Electrical aspect. This aspect is intended to ensure that the device does not deliver any electrical shock to the body.

A decade ago wireless sensor networks (WSNs), resulting primarily from developments in miniaturization and low-powered electronics, opened up the possibility of deploying computing capabilities ubiquitously. Not surprisingly, the last few years have seen the extension of this capability to the human body, leading to the development of body area networks (BANs), which are networks of medical devices and sensors worn on or implanted in the human body. They are used for monitoring and actuation purposes and typically applied in, but not limited to, medical settings. In this book we have aimed at providing a systematic description of how to design and develop safe, secure, and sustainable BANs. We have focused on ideas heretofore available only in scattered research articles and development guides for open-source sensor platforms. Our hope is to bring the latest technological developments in the domain of BANs to a wider audience.Body area networks are becoming increasingly vital for nations and societies worldwide, especially in an attempt to reduce the burgeoning healthcare costs. In this book we have attempted to give a cohesive account of (i) their principal components, properties, and characteristics; (ii) the need for safe, secure, and sustainable design of BANs and the approaches available for addressing this need; and (iii) experiences with, and issues involved in, implementing actual BANs, drawing on lessons learnt from actual implementation. So far, the major focus of the BAN community has been on developing the hardware platforms and basic signal-processing techniques for BANs.