IET Radar Sonar and Navigation (RSN) has selected a research paper that Dr. Yimin Daniel Zhang, Associate Professor and Director of the Advanced Signal Processing Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, coauthored with his colleagues to receive the 2016 IET RSN Premium Award for the best paper published in the IET RSN journal in the past two years. IET RSN is one of the most prestigious journals in radar, which is one of Dr. Zhang’s focused research areas. IET, standing for The Institution of Engineering and Technology, is a major professional society in the engineering and technology community, with more than 150,000 members in 127 countries.
The award-winning paper, titled ‘Multi-window time and frequency signature reduction from undersampled continuous-wave radar measurements for fall detection,’ was published in the special issue on Application of Radar to Remote Patient Monitoring and Eldercare of the IET RSN journal in February 2015. It develops a key technology for the detection of senior falls based on radar technology. In particular, in this paper, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues restore the time-frequency signatures associated with human motor activities, such as falling, bending over, sitting, and standing, by using a hybrid approach of compressive sensing and multi-window analysis.
Elderly falls can result in injuries, reduced quality of life and represent one of the leading causes of death in the elderly population. Therefore, fall detection, or more broadly, assisted living for senior citizens, became an important research and development direction for safe and healthy senior lives and cost-effective healthcare support and medical treatments. Radar-based assisted living is a promising multidiscipline technology that requires expertise in radar signal processing, nonstationary signal analysis, and machine learning.
To further promote the development of advanced technologies for assisted living, Dr. Zhang will co-organize two special sessions in this area later this year: “Signal Processing for Assisted Living Technologies” at the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July, and “Emerging Sensing Technologies for Assisted Living” at Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers in Pacific Grove, California, in November. Presentations at both special sessions are by invitation only and will be given by renowned experts.