An adaptive physiology-aware communication framework for distributed medical cyber physical systems

For emergency medical cyber-physical systems, enhancing the safety and effectiveness of patient care, especially in remote rural areas, is essential. While the doctor to patient ratio in the United States is 30 to 10,000 in large metropolitan areas, it is only 5 to 10,000 in most rural areas; and the highest death rates are often found in the most rural counties. Use of telecommunication technologies can enhance effectiveness and safety of emergency ambulance transport of patients from rural areas to a regional center hospital. It enables remote monitoring of patients by the physician experts at the tertiary center. There are critical times during transport when physician experts can provide vital assistance to the ambulance Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) to associate best treatments. However, the communication along the roads in rural areas can range irregularly from 4G to low speed 2G links, including some parts of routes with cellular network communication breakage. This unreliable and limited communication bandwidth together with the produced mass of clinical data and the many information exchanges pose a major challenge in real-time supervision of patients. In this study, we define the notion of distributed emergency care, and propose a novel adaptive physiology-aware communication framework which is aware of the patient condition, the underlying network bandwidth, and the criticality of clinical data in the context of the specific diseases. Using the concept of distributed medical CPS models, we study the semantics relation of communication Quality of Service (QoS) with clinical messages, criticality of clinical data, and an ambulance's undertaken route all in a disease-aware manner. Our proposed communication framework is aimed to enhance remote monitoring of acute patients during ambulance transport from a rural hospital to a regional center hospital. We evaluate the components of our framework through various experimentation phases including simulation, instrumentation, real-world profiling, and validation

Challenges and Research Directions in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems

Medical cyber-physical systems (MCPS) are lifecritical, context-aware, networked systems of medical devices. These systems are increasingly used in hospitals to provide highquality continuous care for patients. The need to design complex MCPS that are both safe and effective has presented numerous challenges, including achieving high assurance in system software, intoperability, context-aware intelligence, autonomy, security and privacy, and device certifiability. In this paper, we discuss these challenges in developing MCPS, some of our work in addressing them, and several open research issue

Assured information sharing for ad-hoc collaboration

Collaborative information sharing tends to be highly dynamic and often ad hoc among organizations. The dynamic natures and sharing patterns in ad-hoc collaboration impose a need for a comprehensive and flexible approach to reflecting and coping with the unique access control requirements associated with the environment. This dissertation outlines a Role-based Access Management for Ad-hoc Resource Shar- ing framework (RAMARS) to enable secure and selective information sharing in the het- erogeneous ad-hoc collaborative environment. Our framework incorporates a role-based approach to addressing originator control, delegation and dissemination control. A special trust-aware feature is incorporated to deal with dynamic user and trust management, and a novel resource modeling scheme is proposed to support fine-grained selective sharing of composite data. As a policy-driven approach, we formally specify the necessary pol- icy components in our framework and develop access control policies using standardized eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML). The feasibility of our approach is evaluated in two emerging collaborative information sharing infrastructures: peer-to- peer networking (P2P) and Grid computing. As a potential application domain, RAMARS framework is further extended and adopted in secure healthcare services, with a unified patient-centric access control scheme being proposed to enable selective and authorized sharing of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), accommodating various privacy protection requirements at different levels of granularity

Toward Biologically-Inspired Self-Healing, Resilient Architectures for Digital Instrumentation and Control Systems and Embedded Devices

Digital Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems in safety-related applications of next generation industrial automation systems require high levels of resilience against different fault classes. One of the more essential concepts for achieving this goal is the notion of resilient and survivable digital I&C systems. In recent years, self-healing concepts based on biological physiology have received attention for the design of robust digital systems. However, many of these approaches have not been architected from the outset with safety in mind, nor have they been targeted for the automation community where a significant need exists. This dissertation presents a new self-healing digital I&C architecture called BioSymPLe, inspired from the way nature responds, defends and heals: the stem cells in the immune system of living organisms, the life cycle of the living cell, and the pathway from Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to protein. The BioSymPLe architecture is integrating biological concepts, fault tolerance techniques, and operational schematics for the international standard IEC 61131-3 to facilitate adoption in the automation industry. BioSymPLe is organized into three hierarchical levels: the local function migration layer from the top side, the critical service layer in the middle, and the global function migration layer from the bottom side. The local layer is used to monitor the correct execution of functions at the cellular level and to activate healing mechanisms at the critical service level. The critical layer is allocating a group of functional B cells which represent the building block that executes the intended functionality of critical application based on the expression for DNA genetic codes stored inside each cell. The global layer uses a concept of embryonic stem cells by differentiating these type of cells to repair the faulty T cells and supervising all repair mechanisms. Finally, two industrial applications have been mapped on the proposed architecture, which are capable of tolerating a significant number of faults (transient, permanent, and hardware common cause failures CCFs) that can stem from environmental disturbances and we believe the nexus of its concepts can positively impact the next generation of critical systems in the automation industry

2016-17 Graduate Bulletin

After 2003 the University of Dayton Bulletin went exclusively online. This copy was downloaded from the University of Dayton\u27s website in March 2018.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/bulletin_grad/1047/thumbnail.jp

Context-Aware Sensor Fusion For Securing Cyber-Physical Systems

The goal of this dissertation is to provide detection and estimation techniques in order to ensure the safety and security of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) even in the presence of arbitrary sensors faults and attacks. We leverage the fact that modern CPS are equipped with various sensors that provide redundant information about the system\u27s state. In such a setting, the system can limit its dependence on any individual sensor, thereby providing guarantees about its safety even in the presence of arbitrary faults and attacks. In order to address the problem of safety detection, we develop sensor fusion techniques that make use of the sensor redundancy available in modern CPS. First of all, we develop a multidimensional sensor fusion algorithm that outputs a bounded fusion set which is guaranteed to contain the true state even in the presence of attacks and faults. Furthermore, we provide two approaches for strengthening sensor fusion\u27s worst-case guarantees: 1) incorporating historical measurements as well as 2) analyzing sensor transmission schedules (e.g., in a time-triggered system using a shared bus) in order to minimize the attacker\u27s available information and impact on the system. In addition, we modify the sensor fusion algorithm in order to provide guarantees even when sensors might experience transient faults in addition to attacks. Finally, we develop an attack detection technique (also in the presence of transient faults) in order to discard attacked sensors. In addition to standard plant sensors, we note that modern CPS also have access to multiple environment sensors that provide information about the system\u27s context (e.g., a camera recognizing a nearby building). Since these context measurements are related to the system\u27s state, they can be used for estimation and detection purposes, similar to standard measurements. In this dissertation, we first develop a nominal context-aware filter (i.e., with no faults or attacks) for binary context measurements (e.g., a building detection). Finally, we develop a technique for incorporating context measurements into sensor fusion, thus providing guarantees about system safety even in cases where more than half of standard sensors might be under attack

1993-1994 Bulletin

Volume 104, Number 4 Scanned from the copy held in University Archives and Special Collections.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/bulletin/1065/thumbnail.jp