Browsing by keyword "Systems and Communications"
Now showing items 1-4 of 4
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Bridging Vital Signs and Social Interactions for Resource Constrained Epidemic ControlThis paper proposes a new approach that uses people's social interaction behavior collected by mobile phones and vital signs collected by wireless body area networks (WBAN) for epidemic control. By this approach, infectious people who are socially active can be quickly identified to be quarantined. To realize this approach, we introduce a notion of critical network and critical node identification algorithm. Observing some resource constraints such as quarantine cost and hardware limitation, we focus on optimizing the proposed approach such that high epidemic control effectiveness is achieved while the corresponding overhead is minimized. Our simulation results demonstrate that our approach can effectively control the spread of epidemic diseases in various situations.
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Cluster-based Epidemic Control Through Smartphone-based Body Area NetworksIncreasing population density, closer social contact, and interactions make epidemic control difficult. Traditional offline epidemic control methods (e.g., using medical survey or medical records) or model-based approach are not effective due to its inability to gather health data and social contact information simultaneously or impractical statistical assumption about the dynamics of social contact networks, respectively. In addition, it is challenging to find optimal sets of people to be isolated to contain the spread of epidemics for large populations due to high computational complexity. Unlike these approaches, in this paper, a novel cluster-based epidemic control scheme is proposed based on Smartphonebased body area networks. The proposed scheme divides the populations into multiple clusters based on their physical location and social contact information. The proposed control schemes are applied within the cluster or between clusters. Further, we develop a computational efficient approach called UGP to enable an effective cluster-based quarantine strategy using graph theory for large scale networks (i.e., populations). The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated through both simulations and experiments on real social contact networks.
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Effective Epidemic Control and Source Tracing Through Mobile Social Sensing over WBANsAccurate and real-time tracing of epidemic sources is critical for epidemic origin analyses and control when outbreaks of epidemic diseases occur. Such tracing requires the simultaneous availability of information about social interactions among people as well as their body vital signs. Existing epidemic control methods are limited due to their inability to collect the above two types of information at the same time. In this paper, for the first time, we propose integrating wireless body area networks (WBANs) for body vital signs collection with mobile phones for social interaction sensing to achieve the desired epidemic source tracing. In particular, we design a mobile phone capability driven hierarchical social interaction detection framework integrated with WBANs. With this framework, we further propose a set of epidemic source tracing and control algorithms including genetic algorithm based search and dominating set identification algorithms to effectively identify epidemic sources and inhibit epidemic spread. We have also conducted extensive simulations, analyses, and case studies based on real data sets, which demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our proposed solutions.
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Interference Mitigation for Cyber-Physical Wireless Body Area Network System Using Social NetworksWireless body area networks (WBANs) are cyber-physical systems that emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring and ubiquitous healthcare services. WBANs could operate in dense environments such as in a hospital and lead to a high mutual communication interference in many application scenarios. The excessive interferences will significantly degrade the network performance, including depleting the energy of WBAN nodes more quickly and even eventually jeopardize people's lives because of unreliable (caused by the interference) healthcare data collections. Therefore, it is critical to mitigate the interference among WBANs to increase the reliability of the WBAN system while minimizing the system power consumption. Many existing approaches can deal with communication interference mitigation in general wireless networks but are not suitable for WBANs because of ignoring the social nature of WBANs by them. Unlike the previous research, we for the first time propose a power game based approach to mitigate the communication interferences for WBANs based on the people's social interaction information. Our major contributions include: 1) modeling the inter-WBANs interference and determine the distance distribution of the interference through both theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations; 2) developing social interaction detection and prediction algorithms for people carrying WBANs; and 3) developing a power control game based on the social interaction information to maximize the system's utility while minimize the energy consumption of WBANs system. The extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the power control game for inter-WBAN interference mitigation using social interaction information. Our research opens a new research vista of WBANs using social networks.

