[This story initially appeared on the CSEE website]

CSEE Professor Tinoosh Mohsenin received a $212,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a three-year project that will develop a heterogeneous ultra low-power accelerator for wearable biomedical computing. The work will be done in collaboration with researchers at George Mason University and students in the UMBC Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Lab.

With the rapid advances in small, low-cost wearable computing technologies, there is a tremendous opportunity to develop personal health monitoring devices capable of continuous vigilant monitoring of physiological signals. Wearable biomedical devices have the potential to reduce the morbidity, mortality, and economic cost associated with many chronic diseases by enabling early intervention and preventing costly hospitalizations. These low-power systems require to have the capacity to provide fast and accurate processing and interpretation of vast amounts of data and generate smart alarms only when warranted. The project will build the foundation of the next generation of heterogeneous biomedical signal processing platforms that can address the current and future generation energy-efficiency requirements and computational demands.

The interdisciplinary project is expected to inspire and enable new approaches to healthcare monitoring, and can significantly impact several fields including human-centered cyber-physical systems, cyber-security, mobile communications, bioinformatics and applications that require high performance and energy efficient embedded computing from different sensors.

[This article originally appeared on the CSEE website]

CSEE professor Ting Zhu received an award from the National Science Foundation to develop improved techniques for identifying a person’s location in dynamically changing environments. The award of $250,000 will support the three-year research project, Real-Time Indoor and Outdoor Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.

Location-based service was ranked number one for the top technology trends by a recent survey in Time magazine, with potential applications in the area of location-based advertising, recommendation, navigation, asset recovery, and gaming. While many companies are working to improve location-based services, most existing indoor and outdoor maps are relatively static. In reality, many indoor and outdoor environments are highly dynamic, raising the need for novel techniques and systems to improve simultaneous localization, mapping, and navigation in modern cities. Moreover, in tasks such as disaster recovery, teams of individuals must cooperate with one another and benefit from accurately knowing their relative positions.

Dr. Zhu’s project introduces a holistic approach for providing real-time, light-weight, and accurate relative positioning to detect peers in both indoor and outdoor environments. The research will advance the development of both the theoretical foundations and practical algorithms for simultaneous localization and mapping.

Professor Chris D. Geddes, Ph.D., FRSC, has been named a Daily Record  Innovator of the Year 2015.

Dr. Geddes, Director of UMBC's Institute of Fluorescence and a faculty member from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has just received the honor for his lab's recent work developing the Lyse-it™ technology, a technology that enables the rapid lysing of cells to collect their genetic material. This is the 4^th time Professor Geddes has been honored by the Daily Record in the last 8 years for his lab's pioneering innovations.

Sample preparation (lysis) is key to the development of many clinical Point-of-Care (POC) and laboratory tests involving cellular genetic analysis. For example, sample preparation is a significant bottleneck in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)-based approaches, the gold standard in both pathogen and clinical (hospital setting) detection today, with available technologies taking many cumbersome, lengthy and costly steps. In addition, commercially available lysis kits today require different kits and protocols for different media (e.g. broth, urine, blood).

To address this bottleneck of speed, cost and complexity, and to address the fact that many laboratories employ multiple kits for routine testing, Dr. Geddes’ lab has developed Lyse-it™, a means to lyse virtually any cell, spore or virus rapidly (typically <20 seconds) in a single-step on a single platform, thereby enabling the genetic material (e.g. DNA) to be collected for downstream analysis on any platform.

Focused microwaves in small disposable sample chambers readily allow the Lyse-it™ user to lyse cellular samples with near-100% efficiency, within 20 seconds on a single platform at a cost less than other technologies available today. Importantly, this lysing approach is generic to a whole range of cells and viruses. This is because it is a single platform (one size fits all), unlike traditional lysing buffer approaches that all use multiple kits for different media.

Key members of Dr Geddes’ lab that participated in this innovation include: Johan Melendez (graduate student), Tonya Santaus (graduate student); Greg Brinsley (undergraduate); Jacob Roberts (undergraduate); Maraki Negesse (undergraduate) and Daniel Kiang (undergraduate).

The Lyse-it™ technology invented by Dr. Geddes is the technology behind his new company of the same name. Lyse-it™ is Dr. Geddes’ third company to date. Dr. Geddes currently has one patent issued and two patents pending on the Lyse-it™ technology.

Dr Geddes has recently received $100,000 from Maryland’s TEDCO and $20,000 from UMBC’s catalyst fund to push the technology forward towards commercialization. 

Figure – Lyse-it™ disposable slides, a rapid and low cost technology for the efficient lysing of cells.