The Body Sensor Networks Conference 2011 is scheduled to be held from May 23-25 at Dallas. A new segment is going to be introduced in this year’s conference, in which wild and innovative ideas will be presented.
Participants are encouraged to share ideas that are beyond the ordinary applications, even if they seem far fetched and impractical. They are expecting around 200 researchers from leading institutions worldwide to participate in this Conference.
Dr. Dinesh Bhatia is strongly supportive of such ideas as he believes that new concepts sprout from such discussions and pave way for path breaking concepts. Dr. Bhatia is the General chair of the organising committee and also a professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas. Quoting an example from the past he noted that the wireless pacemaker, which seemed unreal 10 years ago is now a commonly used technology.
BSN technology is still in its nascent stages and hence is a field open to innovative ideas. It is important to ensure privacy of medical data while exploring new avenues. The prime intent of BSN technology is to make available inexpensive solutions by use of wearable or implantable sensors. The applications should detect early problematic signs in addition to monitoring vital parameters. Another area, in which research is being done, is to help athletes improve their techniques and also avoid injures.
Research in this field faces many physical challenges as the human body is a challenging environment to implant sensors. It is essential that the sensors are very small, need less power and need to be positioned inside our bodies to transmit uninterrupted and clear signals.
The organising committee of the conference has experts from some premier institutes like the Harvard Medical School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College of London and the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Roozbeh Jafri of UT Dallas and Dr. John Lach of the University of Virginia heads the technical program for the conference. Dr. S. Venkatesan is in charge of conference tutorials.