Proteus: Revolutionizing the way health conditions can be monitored 

Prof. Fan Ye, who instrumented the ‘Home of the Future Lab’ located at the Center of Excellence and Wireless Information Technology (CEWIT), has continued his work by helping create a data collection infrastructure in home-based health monitoring.  Named Proteus, it includes: i) scalable, continuous deployment and update of devices with automatic bootstrapping; ii) automatic fault and error monitoring and recovery with watchdogs and LED feedback, and complementary edge and cloud storage backups; and iii) an easy-to-use data-agnostic pipeline for integrating new modalities.  In Greek mythology, Proteus is seen as a sea-god noted for being versatile and capable of assuming many different forms.  Prof. Ye states “the infrastructure within Proteus is very flexible and can incorporate many different sensing modalities such as wearable devices that sense vital signs and non-touch ones that support remote sensing.  We also want Proteus to provide analysis and host AI machine learning analytics to manage different kinds of health conditions and diseases.”

Installing, configuring, and deploying sensing technology within homes to help older adults age in place is revolutionizing the way health conditions can be monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  For example, Parkinsons disease is a progressive disorder that affects the nervous system and the parts of the body controlled by the nerves.  Symptoms start slowly and are barley noticeable.  Prof. Ye explains that Proteus can make a significant difference in treatment choices for this cohort. “Monitoring is key.  Let's say for instance monitoring a specific home, you're able to see a client walk around for a month or two. You get yourself a baseline, such as how well they can move and then you monitor that same client, maybe with certain medication. Then you may see differences in levels of mobility, which is due to the medication. You can actually see if something is really, really working the way it's supposed to.  This continuous data and continuous monitoring are critical and the infrastructure in Proteus is exactly built for that purpose.”

One important aspect of Proteus is to ensure privacy. All sensitive information gathered via Proteus will stay within a client’s home.  It would be analyzed on the spot using an edge server in the home.  However, general data that may help other clients can be easily uploaded to a cloud infrastructure helping to train and build much more powerful models that can be ultimately beneficial to an entire population.