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MASTER OF SCIENCE THESIS DEFENSE BY: David J. Goncalves

When: Thursday, April 27, 2017
8:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Where: > See description for location
Cost: Free
Description: TOPIC: VEHICLE OCCUPANT VITALS MONITORING

LOCATION: Lester W. Cory Conference Room, Science & Engineering Building (SENG), Room 213A

ABSTRACT:
Smart and autonomous vehicles have, since inception of the concept, been always focused on presenting the system data to make environment-based decisions. The concern has always focused on monitoring the surroundings of the vehicle and make decisions based on perceived situation from the data collected. Vehicles today may not be entirely autonomous, but they are capable enough to aid drivers for road safety due to limitation of human perceptions and/or negligence of human errors. Features of driver assistance, such as Ford's system of adaptive cruise control and lane keeping or Subaru's forward collision, compensate the latency of human reaction time and prevent collisions and other accidents on the roads.

While the debate will undoubtedly continue in the foreseeable future as to whether autonomous vehicles will hit the mainstream market, incremental affordable systems have been built to aid the driver on top of available features in vehicles for road safety, travel convenience, and occupant entertainment. While most state-of-the-art vehicle monitoring systems function at monitoring the environment around a vehicle, this thesis aims at developing a system that monitors the driver and occupants inside a vehicle. The work integrates a spectrum of health-monitoring sensors including pulse rate, body temperature, alcohol level, and steering wheel contact, as well as smart watch heartbeat. The health statistics obtained from the data collected are used to detect anomaly or event. The information triggers an alert directly to local emergency services in real time or is archived for future investigation used by insurance agencies and court cases.

Through an intensive research on both body sensors and vehicular safety products, currently available and in development, a prototype system has been built that collects data about the user via various sensors adopted in the system. The system utilizes the cutting-edge technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) for connected vehicles, the biggest thing in IoT, with a wireless sensor network, as well as modern devices such as smart watches and smartphones. The resulted prototype demonstrates seamless collection from multiple sensors and devices wirelessly and comprehend the occupant vitals for their health and safety monitoring.

Future work of this vehicle occupant vitals monitoring system will study the effective of alternative designs on various metrics such as sensing choice, communication efficiency, security, privacy, and usability.

NOTE: All ECE Graduate Students are ENCOURAGED to attend.
All interested parties are invited to attend. Open to the public.

Advisor: Dr. Hong Liu
Committee Members: Dr. Honggang Wang and Dr. Liudong Xing, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Dr. Xiaoqin Zhang, Department of Computer and Information Science

*For further information, please contact Dr. Hong Liu at 508.999.8514, or via email at hliu@umassd.edu.
Topical Areas: General Public, University Community, College of Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering