Project Description

Development of smart garments is currently hindered by their battery dependence, reduced washability, and incompatibility with existing large-scale textile manufacturing technologies. Prof. Martinez has developed an industrially scalable approach to transform conventional fabrics into smart textiles—wirelessly powered by omniphobic silk-based coils (OSCs). OSCs are stretchable, lightweight, and waterproof power-receiving coils that can be easily sewn into garments. If there could be a private and efficient method for mobile devices to wirelessly retrieve and analyze the biomedical data, then smart textiles could become a transformative technology making us more productive, monitoring our health status, and perhaps even flagging medical emergencies.

Prof. Bagchi has developed a software stack for Internet of Things (IoT) systems, where reliability, privacy, and security are paramount. Parts of the software were adopted by Google in its Wear OS for wearables like smart watches in 2020. There are some fundamental software and security challenges to apply this stack to smart textiles. The frequent communication from smart textiles to nearby internet-connected nodes needs to be both privacy preserving and highly energy optimized.

Extending out from our platform, this project will develop a customized software stack for IoT devices and will be demonstrated through a biomedically smart t-shirt, capable of sensing and transmitting physiological signals. We will then develop lightweight data analytics on nearby edge devices to determine health conditions from the physiological data.

Start Date

May 2022

Postdoctoral Qualifications

The post-doctoral researcher will have the following required skills:
1. Software development for embedded devices
2. Data analytics skills with large-scale data
3. Hardware-software co-design

The post-doctoral researcher will ideally have the following additional skills:
1. Energy-efficient software design
2. Privacy preserving data transformations.

Co-Advisors

Saurabh Bagchi; Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Computer Science (CS, Courtesy); https://saurabhbagchi.us

Ramses Martinez; Industrial Engineering (IE) and Biomedical Engineering (BME); https://engineering.purdue.edu/FlexiLab/

External Collaborator

Ayush Patwari; Senior Software Engineer, Google; patwaria@google.com
Bratin Saha; Vice President, Amazon AI; sbratin@amazon.com

Bibliography

1) de Medeiros, Marina Sala, Debkalpa Goswami, Daniela Chanci, Carolina Moreno, and Ramses V. Martinez. "Washable, breathable, and stretchable e-textiles wirelessly powered by omniphobic silk-based coils." Nano Energy (2021): 106155.
2) Sala de Medeiros, Marina, Daniela Chanci, Carolina Moreno, Debkalpa Goswami, and Ramses V. Martinez. "Waterproof, breathable, and antibacterial self‐powered e‐textiles based on omniphobic triboelectric nanogenerators." Advanced Functional Materials 29, no. 42 (2019): 1904350.
3) Yi, Edgardo Barsallo, Heng Zhang, Amiya K. Maji, Kefan Xu, and Saurabh Bagchi. "Vulcan: Lessons on reliability of wearables through state-aware fuzzing." In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 391-403. 2020.
4) Yi, Edgardo Barsallo, Amiya Maji, and Saurabh Bagchi. "How reliable is my wearable: A fuzz testing-based study." In 2018 48th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 410-417. IEEE, 2018.
5) Sen, Shreyas, Jinkyu Koo, and Saurabh Bagchi. "Trifecta: Security, energy efficiency, and communication capacity comparison for wireless iot devices." IEEE Internet Computing 22, no. 1 (2018): 74-81.