The National Science Foundation (NSF) www.nsf.gov has awarded $8.75 million for five years to advance two projects involving Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) that will seamlessly integrate computation and physical components.
CPS have the potential to benefit many sectors of our society including healthcare. Advances in sensors and wearable devices will improve medical care from disease prevention to emergency response.
Synthetic biology and robotics hold the promise of regenerating and maintaining the body in radical new ways. Today, little is known about how advances in CPS can integrate these technologies to improve health outcomes.
The first CPS project has a team of computer scientists, roboticists, and biologists from Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT working on developing bio-CPS to use to engineer living cells.
They are developing a system that combines the capabilities of nano-scale robots with specially designed synthetic organisms. The scientists believe the hybrid bio-CPS will be able to perform functions that were thought impossible to do from microscopic assembly to cell sensing within the body.
The second CPS project “Medical-CPS and the Cyberheart” involves researchers from seven universities and centers working together to develop far more realistic cardiac and device models than currently exist.
The Cyberheart platform can be used to test and validate medical devices faster at a far lower cost than existing methods. Cyberheart can also be used to design safe and patient-specific device therapies which would lower the risk to the patient.
The researchers on the project are combining patient-specific computational models of heart dynamics with advanced mathematical techniques to analyze how these models interact with medical devices.
Analytical techniques can be used to detect potential flaws in device behavior early on during the device design phase even before human trials begin. They can also be used in a clinical setting to optimize device settings on a patient-by-patient basis before devices are implanted.
The team will develop virtual device models which can be coupled together with virtual heart models to realize a full virtual development platform that can be subjected to computational analysis and simulation techniques.