Carl A. Gunter, Ph.D., will present a lecture on "Challenges in Software Engineering for Assisted Living" as part of the Health Systems Seminar Series. Lunch will be served at noon.

Abstract:

Assisted living offers the prospect of better care at lower costs by exploiting technological advances that enable low-cost medical devices that can report their results from remote locations, such as homes or assisted living residences. However, this promise also faces a collection of sobering challenges for the software engineering of such systems. In particular, there is a need for systems to be highly reliable, very user-friendly and respect the safety and privacy constraints befitting their application. Moreover, this needs to be accomplished in a business and regulatory environment oriented more toward hospital systems; such systems often fail to meet the requirements for interoperability and extensibility needed by assisted living systems. This talk provides an overview of some of these challenges and information about working on them, touching on ideas for the development of an Assisted Living Service Provider akin to the current services that monitor homes for fires and security violations.  Key issues include how to achieve reliability for extensible medical systems and how to protect security and privacy while maintaining ease of use in remote monitoring systems.

Speaker’s Bio:

Carl A. Gunter is a professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Illinois, director of Illinois Security Lab, the Center for Health Information Privacy and Security, and the HHS Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security. He has made research contributions in the semantics of programming languages, formal analysis of networks and security, and privacy. His recent work concerns security and privacy issues for the power grid and healthcare information technology. He is the author of more than 100 scientific research publications and patents and a textbook on semantics of programming languages published by MIT Press. He is a founder of Probaris Technologies, a company that provides identity management technologies, and has served as a consultant to research labs and companies and as an expert witness on legal cases concerning fraud, contract, copyright and patent infringement.