With wearable devices such as Fitbits and smartwatches now being commonplace, users can easily monitor their personal biological metrics (heart rate, temperature) in real-time. With so many devices collecting user data, researchers at Carleton are exploring how crowdsourced health information from wearable devices can provide real-time, actionable information to support our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike contact tracing apps, which provide delayed contact information after cases have already been confirmed, Dr. Paulo Garcia and his team are developing a distributed system where individual users operate as both sensors and communication nodes, enabling the collection of live data that could be used to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Achieving this goal while also ensuring privacy requires careful considerations at the wearable device and interconnect levels. In this talk, Dr. Garcia will explore how knowledge in embedded systems design can be combined with recent advances in distributed systems to create privacy-protecting wearable devices for real-time pandemic response.

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About the Speaker

Dr. Paulo Garcia joined Carleton University’s Department of Systems and Computer Engineering in 2018, establishing a research program on embedded systems. Prior to joining Carleton, Dr. Garcia was a Senior Research Scientist at the United Technologies Research Center (Cork, Ireland), working on safety-critical embedded systems and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh, U.K.), working on embedded sensors for signal processing. Dr. Garcia was awarded his PhD by the University of Minho, Portugal in 2015 and, during his doctoral work, was a visiting researcher at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, and the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand.

Dr. Garcia’s research interests include embedded systems design and programming, models of computation, computer architectures and reconfigurable computing. He is a member of the IEEE and a regular reviewer for several journals and conferences.

Dr. Garcia recently received a CU COVID-19 Rapid Research Response Grant for Social Wearables – Crowdsourcing eHealth Technology.

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About the Series

Ingenious Talks is a special speaker series from the Faculty of Engineering and Design that engages the community in discussions of timely and innovative ideas in engineering, design and technology.