July 2020

  1. Our work on reliability of wearable devices is featured in a Purdue news story. This is the work that appeared in MobiSys 2020 and showed how it is possible by directed fuzzing to cause a wearable device to continuously reboot. We also suggested a mitigation action and after working with Google for several months, a patch was released to WearOS in June 2020.
  2. We presented two hot-off-the-press research results in the DSN Fast Abstracts program, held Jun 30-Jul 2 virtually. Fast Abstracts are short two-page papers that are selected to highlight promising avenues of research in the area of dependability. The first paper is a cautionary tale in trusting heart rate measurements from our smartwatches and explores the root cause behind the unreliability. The second paper shows how a mobile device can choose an edge computing node for offloading computation — importantly, it provides the first simulator that people can use to develop their solutions in this space.
[A] The Effect of Motion on PPG Heart Rate Sensors

Daniel Hu (Purdue University), Calvin Henry (Purdue University), Saurabh Bagchi (Purdue University)

[B] Reliability Analysis of Edge Scenarios Using Pedestrian Mobility

Kshitiz Goel (Purdue University), Abhishek Bhaumick (Purdue University), Deepika Kaushal (Purdue University), Saurabh Bagchi (Purdue University)