seamless T-shirt woven with fiber optics and electrically conductive thread could portend a 21st century fashion that saves lives.

Called a sensate liner, the garment’s circuitry collects vital-sign information from sensors woven in the fabric and attached to the body, and passes them to a pager-size processor that analyzes the data and transmits it via satellite to a central monitoring station.

In essence, the shirt acts as “a computer motherboard,” says Dr. Sundaresan Jayaraman of Georgia Tech’s School of Textile and Fiber Engineering and principal investigator for the project.

The shirt was originally developed for the military as a high-tech triage and locating tool.

“The sensate liner can help a physician determine the extent of a soldier’s injuries based on the strength of his heartbeat and respiratory rate,” says Jayaraman. “This information is vital for assessing who needs assistance first during emergency situations in which there are numerous casualties.”

Jayaraman says the shirt can be modified for other health-monitoring situations. Hospital personnel could keep watch on the progress of surgery patients recovering at home, or on the health of vulnerable elderly individuals living alone. Incorporated into the design of pajamas, the sensate liner could monitor the respiratory rate of babies at risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. NASA could employ the lightweight garment to monitor vital signs of astronauts, and athletes could wear the garment to monitor and reach their optimal heart and respiratory rates during training.

n the first half of the next century, unprecedented numbers of people will retire from the workforce. By 2030, 22 percent of the U.S. population—66 million people—will be over age 65. Their continued quality of life may depend in part upon Georgia Tech research.

“I’m interested in solving important, fundamental problems of cognition and aging, and skill acquisition and aging,” says psychology Professor Arthur D. Fisk. “It’s also important to determine what aspects of system design, product design, training and the activities of daily living we really need to worry about from an age-related perspective.”

Fisk is associated with the Center for Applied Cognitive Research on Aging, a consortium of researchers. Computer usage by older adults along with improvements in access, training and design are among the center’s activities.

At Tech, researchers are testing new software to help older adults overcome decreased fine motor control that makes it difficult for them to use a computer mouse or joystick. They’re also working with University of Georgia faculty to encourage older adults to use the Internet, which could be a primary source of social interaction, entertainment, information, goods and services in the next century.

“The implication is that young people today are going to have no problem with technology in the future,” says Fisk, who also serves as president of the national Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. “Technology is advancing at a very, very rapid rate. We have to design technology appropriately from a human perspective, so that humans can interact properly, efficiently and safely with it.”

Borodovsky

In the future, to be a premier technical institute will require a strong commitment to biosciences and the engineering and technology that flow from it,” says Dr. Robert Nerem, director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Tech’s presence in the rapidly growing field of biotechnology covers many fronts. Nerem’s research is focused on understanding the effects of blood flow on the cells that line blood vessels, and the development of substitute blood vessels made from natural materials.

Artificial tissue is also the emphasis of Dr. Athanassios Sambanis, an associate professor in the School of Chemical Engineering. He is creating an implantable structure of insulin-secreting cells that would provide normal pancreatic function for diabetics.

Bioinformatics is an innovative way of managing the staggering amount of information in DNA—a prerequisite for the development of new genetically engineered medical applications and pharmaceuticals in the 21st century.

Dr. Mark Borodovsky, a professor of biology and mathematics, invented a technique that employs statistical pattern recognition to help scientists locate certain genes and the resulting protein sequences in complex DNA molecules. A software program, GeneMark, has already been used to decipher the genome of certain bacteria species. A new version has been developed for locating genes in humans.

A partnership between Tech and the Medical College of Georgia could provide more convenient medical checkups. Telemedicine technology involves two-way audio and visual connections between doctors and their patients in private or nursing homes.

“A client/server database structure has been developed to capture and store vital-signs measurements performed by the patient,” says Michael Burrow, a senior research engineer at Tech. “This allows the care provider to access the patient’s data from any location and to input additional data. Eventually, the system will be compatible with hospital database systems, which will create another avenue to input and access patient data.”

Telemedicine technology has enabled Medical College of Georgia doctors to remotely monitor the health of patients.

In the future, the telecommunications link between physician and patient could include a wider range of in-home measurement and testing to allow for “electronic house calls,” Burrow says.

ith automation touching and transforming so many aspects of life, it’s inevitable that technology will leave an indelible mark on home life as well.

Under the auspices of Georgia Tech’s Broadband Institute and the Future Computing Environments Group, a “living laboratory” is being constructed near campus to develop computing applications in and around the home environment.

Dubbed “The Aware Home,” the residence will have two identical and independent living spaces consisting of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, one office, kitchen, dining room, living room and laundry room. The home also will boast a shared basement with an entertainment area and control room for centralized computing services.

The Aware Home will qualify everyday activities with an eye toward identifying those who may benefit from computerized assistance, and provide a real-word testbed for new applications as they are developed.

The inaugural residents of the two-story home will probably be Tech students involved in the project. Researchers hope eventually to host a family and elderly occupants as representative of groups expected to benefit from the research.

While the home will include high-tech information and multimedia entertainment services, the project is more ambitious. The name—Aware Home—suggests an environment where a ubiquitous computer infrastructure provides seamless human-computer interaction. This interface may be accomplished through a combination of sensors in the house and a wearable computer device.

“By learning about users’ habits and behavior, embedded systems in the home may perform complex, seemingly intelligent tasks automatically,” says Assistant Professor Irfan Essa in the College of Computing. “Part of the technological and social challenge is determining where to put various interaction and sensor technologies for maximum benefit.”

Adds Dr. Thad Starner of the College of Computing, “The home can contain a large amount of computation and infrastructure for sensing at a distance, while a wearable has the advantage of immediate and intimate contact with the user. The data gathered on the wearable might be filtered and released to the environmental infrastructure as appropriate.”

A key technology associated with tracking individuals as they move throughout the home is called “smart floor,” a system that identifies and locates a person based solely on his or her footsteps.

“We will place strategically sized and located force-sensitive load tiles throughout the Aware Home to gather footstep data from occupants,” says Dr. Gregory D. Abowd, an assistant professor in the College of Computing. “The tiles are flush with the floor and consist of a metal plate supported by four industrial load cells; the data we gather from these tiles are known as ground reaction force (GRF) profiles. We have gathered sets of training data to create footstep models for each person; we then compare each new GRF profile against these models and search for the best match.”

Georgia Tech researchers are also evaluating systems based on grids of piezoelectric wires, grids of deformation-sensitive optical fibers and networks of vibration sensors attached to the underside of the flooring.

“In this tracking system, we will establish identity and a location landmark using the Smart Floor tiles, and track the movement of users with the finer-grained system,” Abowd says.

Applications developed at Aware Home may one day help parents keep track of infants and toddlers easier, turn lights on and off when someone enters or leaves a room, and even find commonly misplaced items such as car keys and eyeglasses. Aware Home technology could also allow the elderly to live more independently in their own homes for a longer period of time.

Porter

nformation technology will have a profound effect upon many—but by no means all—aspects of everyday life in the new millennium, according to participants in an informal project called “Information Revolution: Its Current and Future Consequences.” It’s also the title of a recently published book that grew out of the year-long series of meetings and research reports.

“In the 1980s, information technology (IT) took off,” says Dr. Alan Porter, a professor of industrial and systems engineering and director of the Technology Policy and Assessment Center. Computing went from an occasional activity for specialists to routine in the lives of most technical professionals, he says, before spreading to embrace the lives of white-collar workers, students, blue-collar workers and, finally, to appear in homes.

“In the 1990s, we’ve become networked—first the technical community, then business and school, then home—via modems, Ethernet, some broadband and wireless. That’s an IT Revolution.

“Now we’re poised for the Information Revolution,” Porter explains. “Newly accessible digitally formatted information is woven into our daily lives. Technical professionals first, then white-collar workers and students, then most of us will rebuild our work and home lives around this resource: ubiquitous electronic information.”

Project participant Dr. Richard Barke of the School of Public Policy agrees with conventional wisdom that the evolution of information technology will increase the pace and volume of electronic human interaction. But he also points out the limits of technology.

“The devices of the Information Revolution will not eliminate the interpersonal aspects of commerce and education,” Barke says. “The important social aspects of commerce and education—gathering, sharing, learning about behavior, spontaneously connecting with others—that require face-to-face contact will not decrease significantly. People will continue to congregate in classrooms, offices, churches, bars and shopping malls.”

Another member of the interdisciplinary group, Dr. Donghua Zhu, expects the information revolution to move beyond human-machine interface to more common machine-to-machine interaction. “Look for the coming of the automatic information finding, classifying and processing machine,” says the visiting professor in the Technology Policy and Assessment Center.

Gary S. Tjaden, director of the Center for Enterprise Systems, Information Technology and Telecommunications Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, believes decentralization will be a key development in the wake of new information technology developed and deployed in the coming decades.

He predicts that “the network computer will not be a successful product; governments will lose control of their currencies and the ability to control interest rates; communications industries that developed as monopolies, oligopolies or because of sheer size will wither.”