Nima TaheriNejad, Ph.D.
TU Wien, Vienna, Austria
Design engineers continuously work on the challenges that Wearable Medical Devices (WMDs) face, however, some of these improvements are rather slow (e.g., battery life-time) and some of them are in contradictions with one another (e.g., better sensors and more complex algorithms against the battery life-time). This calls for a different type of solutions; self-aware system design. Self-aware systems monitor themselves, their resources, behavior, and environment to make decisions which bring them closer to their dynamic goals. Recently, system self-awareness methods have been used in WMDs such as Early Warning Score (EWS) and Epileptic Seizure detection, where they showed a great promise by reducing their power consumption (thus extending their usage time) and increasing their reliability. In this tutorial, after a brief review of existing challenges for WMDs, we present the basic principles and different models of self-aware systems, in particular Observe-Decide-Act (ODA) model. Next, we show its application and benefits in examples of WMDs, namely EWS, Epileptic Seizure detection, and Iris Flower detection in the eyes. Finally, we conclude with a summary and projections to the future.