Technology integration

We present some relevant multi-technology demonstrators as examples of concrete outcomes of Nano-Tera.CH, and describe how the various enabling technologies can synergistically be integrated. Nevertheless, the Nano-Tera.CH program is certainly not limited to these demonstrators, but it addresses the overall research space where crossbreeding of technologies provides an enabler to solving health, security and environment-related problems.  As such it is open to any other relevant multi-technology, multi-institutional collaboration within the aforementioned overall research space.

Ambient and Health Systems

The objective of bio-sensing networks is to protect the humans and the environment from pollution and pathogens, as well as a provide means to support remote diagnosis and medicine. In essence, this challenge merges various technologies, ranging from biological sensing to systems and software for tera-scale integration, including security and distributed processing.

Bio-sensing networks can take different embodiments according to various objectives, such as:

• Distributed bio-sensor networks for water monitoring: The objective is to trap bio-elements in a fluid environment such as rivers and lakes or salty waters, perform some local analysis and transmit measured data over a large-scale distributed wireless sensor network. The design and the deployment of such large-scale self-organized bio-sensing network pose significant challenges across all Nano-Tera.CH enabling technologies. Specific challenges in sensing relate to the autonomous selection of samples, their bio-chemical processing in micro/nano-fluidic channels, the molecular-level binding to probes and its integrated sensing by non-labeled techniques. Thus, sensor nodes have to be made autonomous through energy harvesting from the environment. The limited and variable availability of the harvested energy, combined with the changing and often harsh environmental conditions, demands optimized wireless sensor networks, which include energy-efficient wireless communication and networking protocols and optimized power management strategies, robust and resource-aware distributed information processing and software. Finally, the actual deployment of the water monitoring system calls for the large-scale system-level integration (preferably on the tera-scale with other complementary environmental monitoring networks), and meaningful fusion of the large-scale spatially distributed measurements to estimate the global water quality.
• Integrated mobile-health sensing and diagnosis networks: These are obtained by combining physiological bio-sensors and mobile nodes such as the ubiquitous cellular telephones. They hold the promise of an improved and permanent diagnostic, better services to remote and isolated communities, lower-cost medical monitoring and better quality of life for patients. The realization of such large-scale integrated e-Health environment poses significant challenges including: (1) the development of high-sensitivity bio-sensors of human samples (saliva, blood and urine); (2) the investigation of new bio-sensing modalities for molecular-level sensing for DNA/viruses and proteins; the design of implantable life-long biochemical and physical sensors with bio-compatible interfaces; (3) large-scale and bio-compatible packaging of sensors and actuators; (4) the design of ultra-lower integrated bio-processing and architectures; (5) ensuring the reliability in terms of dependability, security and correctness of the mobile-health sensing and actuating system (both hardware and software); (6) Development of reliable distributed diagnosis modalities, potentially based on fusion of the data gather by a network of wearable and/or implantable sensors; (7) last but not least, energy-efficient wireless communication protocols and/or implanted sensor readout techniques; (8) Large-scale data integration, management, interpretation and analysis for an improved assessment and follow-up of drug efficiency, evolution of conditions and patient rehabilitation.

From a scientific standpoint, these objectives push the technology limits and require a significant engineering integration effort. From a commercial impact standpoint, both demonstrators can have significant economic impact in disaster prevention and in lowering health management costs, besides raising the security of the individual and of the community.

Wearable Systems for Health and Security

Wearable embedded systems are expected to become common-street commodities, once they become unobtrusive, secure, autonomous and intelligent health and security assistants, as well as seamless interfaces between humans and the ambient information systems.  Within the scope of Nano-Tera.CH initiative, a wide range of wearable systems is envisioned, as previously highlighted.

In the following, we describe the specific challenges arising in two wearable systems of particular relevance and currency, namely wearable systems for sports monitoring and elderly care.

• Wearable systems for body-function monitoring for professional and recreation sports: These are instrumental to acquire and closely monitor the metabolic and body functions of sport professionals, to enable the achievement of high-level athletic performance. To do so, in a non-intrusive fashion and in realistic outdoor training and competition set-ups, it is highly desirable to design an innovative, low-weight, acceleration-resistant and autonomous wireless sensor network system. Such a wireless sensor network should be capable of acquiring the desired biometric information, process it and communicate it to the coaches, trainers and medical staff, who would use this data to accurately assess the athlete?s in situ physical condition, energy expenditure, and accordingly devise appropriate training and diet programs, as well as take optimal tactical decisions. The realization of such a wearable systems poses significant challenges including: (1) engineering of unobtrusive integrated bio-compatible sensors that are integrated with garments (e-textiles) and that are acceleration and effort-resistant; (2) devising ultra-low power (bio-) processors; (3) aggressive micro/nano-electronics solutions miniaturized form factor, ultra-low-power operation; (4) the design of an innovative software-defined radio wearable wireless communications hub that supports continuous and ubiquitous communications (indoor and outdoor), through seamless transition between a number of protocols, i.e., the very-low-power very-low data rate protocols for gathering information from the body-area sensor network, and ambient short-range wireless protocols (e.g., Bluetooth) and wide-range wireless cellular networks (e.g., GSM-UMTS) as well as to global positioning systems; (4) data integration, management, interpretation and analysis for an improved assessment of athletic performance; (5) development of novel cryptographic techniques to ensure data and communication privacy.
• Wearable systems for elderly care and monitoring: The goal of such systems is to provide the technological means to constantly and unobtrusively monitor and support elderly people in their daily life, who are in good or fair medical conditions and have autonomous mobility,  while ensuring their safety and security through alerting professional help in the event of a possibly hazardous situation. In this case, monitoring relates to collecting medical, positioning and acceleration information, to detect possible problems (e.g., falls), to provide timely and useful information to the wearer in specifically identified situations and to provide a continuous contact with a monitoring center and/or relatives. The engineering of such an integrated wearable elderly monitoring system requires breakthroughs in many areas including: (1) unobtrusive highly integrated largely autonomous sensors to allow the best quality of life; (2) wearable computing robustness, redundancy and dependability of alert signals, data and wireless communication security, and system re-configurability for various activities; (3) modular system design and implementation, where the various modules must be technologically compatible (be they hardware or software), through  well-specified and robust interfaces and middleware; (4) novel and alternative man-machine interfaces to allow improved interaction with the wearable system through voluntary actions or even indirect acquisition of nerve signals, particularly for the target elderly persons who may be reluctant to use more conventional man-machine interfaces; (5) software reliability, diagnosis and alert dependability, as well as data privacy and integrity; (6) intelligent information processing and management to avoid ?data overloading?, which may cause future disregard of critical information, either by the end user or by interacting persons (family, doctors, caretakers, etc.); (7) integration  of the wearable system into ambient intelligence systems.

Integrated Experiments in Space

One of the potential uses of low-cost pico-satellite is to support bio-medical experiments in a zero gravity environment for experiments lasting several weeks to months. An example of such experiments is cell development (e.g., mammalian immune system) in microgravity, which is key to understanding the effects of space environment on living systems and for which long-term measurements are needed. Pico-satellites provide an attractive technology for such bio-medical experiments because they provide dramatic cost reduction and a greatly accelerated qualification process compared to traditional zero-gravity research performed by humans on space stations or shuttles. Moreover, other available low-cost options are either limited to extremely short experiments (only 20 seconds on parabolic flights and drop towers) or do not offer a true microgravity environment (centrifuge).

• Cell development experiments in zero-gravity. The underlying technology is the lab-on-chip technology, where the chip itself hosts the experiment and drives it through integrated control. Lab-on-chip has been a very active field of research in the past few years, but many challenges remain to integrate a complete biological experiment on a pico-satellite, where the payload mass may not exceed 500 grams, including all control electronics, and where the available average power is below 2 W. Underlying challenges relate to: (1) pushing the limits of lab-on-chip technology, including micro-pumping, mixing of different growth media and waste and read-out schemes; (2) novel integrated low-power automated sensing modalities, as optical (e.g., microscopy), fluorescence, and other analytical techniques used in labs on earth are typically too bulky and power hungry for a pico-satellite platform, or require delicate tuning by an operator; (3) devising pico-satellite control mechanisms for temperature stabilization and attitude stabilization; (4) Robust and compact integrated sensing and imaging schemes to maximize the scientific return of the lab-on-chip microgravity experiments; (5) low-power wireless sensor networks for satellite-health (i.e., satellite conditions) monitoring; (6) compact reconfigurable and smart antennas.

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