Group Receives $2M to Research Wireless Patient Monitoring

HOUSTON—A team of wireless researchers and doctors from Rice University and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute have won a $2 million federal grant to design and test next-generation wireless platforms and remote patient monitoring devices in Houston's working-class Pecan Park neighborhood.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the money to a six-person team of researchers from Rice's Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) and from the Abramson Center for the Future of Health, a joint effort by Methodist and the University of Houston. The funding was made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

"This funding will allow researchers at Rice and Methodist to continue and expand upon previously funded NSF programs aimed at using wireless technology for health care and slashing the costs of wireless R&D," said the grant's principal investigator Ashutosh Sabharwal, CMC director and assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice.

The grant will fund development of CMC's WARP project in radical new directions. Short for "wireless open-access research platform," WARP is a turnkey, open-source platform that slashes the costs of creating test-bed systems for wireless R&D. Researchers using WARP don't need to buy new radio transmitters, wireless routers and network access points for each network they want to test. Instead, they simply write computer programs that configure the WARP system to act like the network they want to test.