We asked Dr. B. Madhusudhanan, Professor & Head, Er.Perumal Manimekalai College of Engineering, President, Dhumra Mahate Information & Communications Technology Associates, India, a few questions about the upcoming first year of the WAMCOS conference, the 1st EAI International Conference on Wireless Networks, Applied Medical Sensor Networks and Computational Science, that will take place in Hosur, India, on September 4-5, 2017.
Since this will be the first edition of the WAMCOS conference, could you introduce its central topic and why it is important? What is this event’s vision?
With wireless networks continuously evolving, the newer generation networks will comprise of devices which are intelligent unlike their predecessors. Sensor networks will evolve the fastest amongst all the wireless network systems and are expected to use more than one trillion sensors by 2020. With huge amount of data generated from these sensors, sensor networks will become synonymous with apps for sensory data analysis and becomes the foundation for Internet of Things. The first edition of WAMCOS provides a platform for researchers from various fields to meet, share and dissect ideas with special focus on medical sensor networks and application of Artificial Intelligence in wireless networks.
What have been the recent developments in wireless and applied medical sensor networks?
When it comes to medical sensor networks, I would broadly classify them into three categories: wearable sensors for routine monitoring, sensors for monitoring in clinical settings, and sensor used for control. Routine monitoring is increasingly available with mobile devices and provides a method to monitor the vital signs. Health monitoring/fitness trackers sensors with apps built into the mobile phone fall into this category and market is flooded with commercial devices. However the challenge is to improve the sensing accuracy and data analysis. In the second category an expert is required to monitor the parameters in controlled settings and is applicable to monitoring of chronic and elderly persons. This category extensively involves M2M communications with decision support systems and is being implemented successfully across multiple areas of medical care. In the third category, medical sensors are finding extensive applications in robots which respond to the external stimuli and respond based on the stimulus. The systems are capable of learning and reproduce changes in behavior of the robotic system.
What are the biggest challenges that this area is currently facing and how can we address them?
Other than size, cost, power management a major challenge among researchers is to address mobility and effectively swim out of the data flood. Be it a wearable device monitoring vital parameters or a M2M device connecting vehicles, effective aggregation of data, routing and data analytics play a crucial role.
What are your expectations for WAMCOS 2017?
Being the first edition of WAMCOS, I hope this platform brings together people from different fields and specialization into a common forum to disseminate knowledge and present their ideas.
WAMCOS 2017 is still accepting papers!
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