Wireless networks have become the most pervasive and ubiquitous tool to connect people at any time and everywhere. Wireless has grown much beyond the original view of “mobile telephony”, and has become the preferred medium to connect to the Internet and its wealth of data and services. Even at home or in the workplace, wireless LANs are quickly replacing wired connections, because of their ease of use and steadily improving performance, which make them equal if not better than wired connections in terms of throughput. 

A natural and promising trend in wireless technology is to go beyond general purpose data interconnection, and handle a host of new services and functions connected to sensing. It is predicted that future wireless devices will host a large number of sensors to monitor the environment and the users' physiological state. In addition, wearable body sensors can be interconnected with the users’ wireless personal device in order to form a body-area sensor network able to monitor critical physical parameters. Exploiting the anytime anywhere connectivity of wireless networks and the advances in sensing technology is predicted to provide tremendous improvement in remote patient care, monitoring of chronic diseases, prevention, and elderly care, with significant cost savings and better effectiveness.

This area is commonly referred to as “wireless health technology”, and can be seen as a sub-topic of the more general “body computing” area. At the University of Southern California, the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Keck School of Medicine have recently created a new Master of Science in Electrical Engineering – Wireless Health Technology (MSEE-WHT) program, with the aim of producing a new generation of highly skilled technical professionals able to conceive, design and implement innovative applications in wireless health.

This talk provides an overview of the area, of the USC MSEE-WHT program, and of the type of projects that our students are working on during their course work and internships. The aim of this talk is to raise interest in our MSEE-WHT program and create synergies and interaction with the local health technology industry in the Southern California environment.

Giuseppe Caire was born in Torino, Italy, in 1965. He received the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 1990, the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 1992 and the Ph.D. degree from Politecnico di Torino, in 1994. He has been Assistant Professor in Telecommunications at the Politecnico di Torino, Associate Professor at the University of Parma, Italy, Professor with the Department of Mobile Communications at the Eurecom Institute, Sophia-Antipolis, France, and he is now Professor with the Electrical Engineering Department of the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California.

He received the Jack Neubauer Best System Paper Award from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society in 2003, and the IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award in 2004 and 2011. Dr. Caire served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 1998-2001 and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in 2001-2003 and was President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 2011. He is now the senior past President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Note: An NDA is required to enter the Medtronic facility. Please contact the organizer to obtain a copy to bring to the event.