Health-care is the most important issue facing both the individuals and the country. As technology is revolutionizing many areas, we expect that health-care industry will also be reformed by the trend of Internet-of-things. Although this has drawn the attention of both the industry and academia, there are many opening problems need to be tackled.

In this thesis, we mainly focus on the following topics:

1. A key bottleneck in wearable technology is battery capacity. We propose a battery-free sensing platform in the form-factor of shoes. We achieve this goal by enabling the whole system running on the harvested energy from two feet. Each foot performs separate tasks and two feet are coordinated by ambient backscatter communication.

2. We report a covert channel threat on existing...[ Read more ]

Health-care is the most important issue facing both the individuals and the country. As technology is revolutionizing many areas, we expect that health-care industry will also be reformed by the trend of Internet-of-things. Although this has drawn the attention of both the industry and academia, there are many opening problems need to be tackled.

In this thesis, we mainly focus on the following topics:

1. A key bottleneck in wearable technology is battery capacity. We propose a battery-free sensing platform in the form-factor of shoes. We achieve this goal by enabling the whole system running on the harvested energy from two feet. Each foot performs separate tasks and two feet are coordinated by ambient backscatter communication.

2. We report a covert channel threat on existing mobile systems. The operation is achieved by controlling the impedance of a device’s wireless network interface card. This operation requires no special privileges on current mobile OSs, which allows the malware to stealthily pass sensitive data to a nearby attacker.

3. It is embarrassing that users easily lose interest in these health-tracking devices. In order to encourage user participation, there are programs that reward users for their healthy behavior. We model it as a monopoly market and theoretically analyze how all parties would behave in this program.

4. Given the dense deployment of ultra-low power backscatter nodes in the near future, multiple access control is becoming an obstacle. We bring in antenna arrays to enable parallel decoding for backscatter tags and greatly boost the throughput for backscatter networks.

We also work toward automatic dietary monitoring. We design a smart-glasses prototype that can detect mastication by monitoring the muscle activity from the temporalis muscle. We also design a smart spoon prototype that can recognize what food is placed on top of utensils during meals.