William J. Kaiser

• University of California, Los Angeles

Citation: Graham, E.A.; Hansen, M.; Kaiser, W.J.; Lam, Y.; Yuen, E.; Rundel, P.W. Dynamic Microclimate Boundaries across a Sharp Tropical Rainforest-Clearing Edge. Remote Sens. 2021, 13, 1646. https://

There is emerging interest in the use of inertial sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers in evaluating rotational instability of the knee. In particular, a number of groups have recently investigated the use of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors in instrumenting the pivot shift examination. Using such sensors, it has been demonstr...

Activity monitoring is becoming increasingly important to enable preventative, diagnostic, and rehabilitative measures in health and wellness applications. While a variety of wearable inertial sensors can discern the behavior of healthy individuals (e.g. gross activity level, some degree of activity classification), outcomes of interest to physicia...

Failure to detect changes in patients’ postoperative health status increases the risk of adverse outcomes, including complications and readmission. We sought to design and implement a real-time surveillance system for postoperative colorectal surgery patients using wireless health technology. Participants were assigned a preprogrammed tablet comput...

Background: Postoperative ileus (POI) can worsen outcomes, increase cost, and prolong hospitalization. We previously found that a disposable, non-invasive acoustic gastrointestinal surveillance (AGIS) biosensor distinguishes healthy controls from patients recovering from abdominal surgery. Here, we tested whether AGIS can prospectively predict whi...

The pivot-shift (PS) examination is used to demonstrate knee instability and detect anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Prior studies using inertial sensors identified the ACL-deficient knee with reasonable accuracy, but none addressed the more difficult problem of using these sensors to determine whether a subject has an ACL deficiency and to...

Profiling the daily activity of a physically disabled person in the community would enable healthcare professionals to monitor the type, quantity, and quality of their patients' compliance with recommendations for exercise, fitness, and practice of skilled movements, as well as enable feedback about performance in real-world situations. Based on ou...

Background: Walking-related disability is the most frequent reason for inpatient stroke rehabilitation. Task-related practice is a critical component for improving patient outcomes. Objective: To test the feasibility of providing quantitative feedback about daily walking performance and motivating greater skills practice via remote sensing. Met...

The Wireless Integrated Network Sensor Next Generation (WINS NG) nodes provide distributed network and Internet access to sensors, controls, and processors that are deeply embedded in equipment, facilities, and the environment. The WINS NG network is a new monitoring and control capability for applications in transportation, manufacturing, health c...

This paper presents a large advance in energy-efficient operating system multiprocessor task scheduling with experimentally proven benefits for standard Linux multi-core computing platforms. This Energy Aware Scheduler (EAS) introduces micro-Operations executed Per Joule (OPJ) as a metric representing run-time task energy efficiency. A novel platfo...

Background Postoperative ileus (POI) can worsen outcomes, increase cost, and prolong hospitalization. An objective marker could help identify POI patients who should not be prematurely fed. We developed a disposable, non-invasive acoustic gastro-intestinal surveillance (AGIS) biosensor. We tested whether AGIS can distinguish healthy controls from...

This paper extends the work of inertial sensor based upper limb motion tracking by introducing a simple calibration method to automatically construct a global reference frame and estimate arm length. The method has effectively eliminated the requirement of manually aligning the sensors' local reference frames when multiple sensors are used to track...

The pivot shift has been correlated with patient-reported outcomes and knee function following ACL injury and reconstruction. Tibial rotation has been recognized as an important component to the pivot shift motion path. However, few methodologies exist to quantify tibial rotation in the clinical setting. The purpose of this study was to validate th...

Today, the bicycle is utilized as a daily commute tool, a physical rehabilitation asset and sporting equipment, prompting studies into the biomechanics of cycling. Of the number of important parameters that affect cycling efficiency, the foot angle profile is one of the most important as it correlates directly with the effective force applied to th...

Vehicle internetworks provide for communications among diverse electronic devices within a vehicle, and for communications among these devices and networks external to the vehicle. The vehicle internetwork comprises specific devices, software, and protocols, and provides for security for essential vehicle functions and data communications, ease of...

In this paper, we present a new gait analysis method using 3D body motion reconstruction with an activity-specific tracking protocol. A kinematic chain modeling the movement of lower extremities was constructed for general lower body activity monitoring. By exploring the nature of walking, a constrained forward-backward statistical linearized sigma...

Enabling large scale monitoring and classification of a range of motion activities is of primary importance due to the need by healthcare and fitness professionals to monitor exercises for quality and compliance. Past work has not fully addressed the unique challenges that arise from scaling. This paper presents a novel end-to-end system solution t...

Measuring the energy consumed by modern secondary storage devices and attributing it to the causative application's processes can guide optimization of application energy efficiency. Prior work has focused on hard disk drive or file system energy management using custom-built measurement systems and models, but suffers from limitations that prohibi...

Stress is a growing problem in society and can cause musculoskeletal complaints. It would be useful to measure stress for prevention of stress-related health problems. An experiment is described in which EMG signals of the upper trapezius muscle were measured with a wireless system during three different stressful conditions: a calculation task (th...

Direct characterization of blood perfusion in tissue is critical to a broad spectrum of applications in assessing circulatory disorders, wound conditions and ensuring outcomes of treatment. The rapid evolution of these conditions and their great risk for subjects require a continuously vigilant monitoring technology. This paper presents a wireless...

Direct measurement of event and component resolved energy dissipation in computing systems is critical for energy optimization of computing and networking applications. Prior research focuses on development of energy consumption models and custom-built energy measurement systems, but suffers from critical drawbacks. This paper addresses these limit...

Computational load of motion estimation in advanced video coding (AVC) standard is significantly high and even worse for HDTV and super-resolution sequences. In this article, a video processing algorithm is dynamically mapped onto a new parallel reconfigurable ...

Within alpine environments the interactions of air temperature, solar irradiance, wind, surface albedo, microtopography, and biotic traits all influence patterns of soil and plant canopy temperatures. The resulting mosaic of surface temperatures has a profound impact on ecosystem processes, plant survival, and ecophysiological performance. Previous...

large scale activity monitoring is a core component of systems aiming to improve our ability to manage fitness, deliver care and diagnose conditions. While much research has been devoted to the accurate classification of motion, the challenges arising from scaling to large communities has received little attention. This paper introduces the problem...

A broad range of embedded networked sensing (ENS) applications have appeared for large-scale systems, introducing new requirements leading to new embedded architectures, associated algorithms, and supporting software systems. These new requirements include the need for diverse and complex sensor systems that present demands for energy and computati...

Energy efficiency has been a longstanding design challenge for wearable sensor systems. It is especially crucial in continuous subject state monitoring due to the ongoing need for compact sizes and better sensors. This paper presents an energy-efficient classification algorithm, based on partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). In ever...

Proliferation of low-cost nonintrusive wearable sensors enables researchers to explore capabilities in monitoring physiological parameters remotely expanding healthcare delivery and reducing costs. One of the parameters that is known to be important in rehabilitation and exercise physiology is human motion monitoring, such as analysis of the walkin...

Fitness advancement has been shown to be one of the most effective interventions against disease and critical to the promotion of general health and wellness. At the same time, fitness evaluation and development of appropriate intervention techniques traditionally requires participation of experienced trainers or physician, expensive equipment and...

Human motion monitoring and activity classification, specifically in the free-living conditions, are becoming increasingly important as preventative and rehabilitative measures in health and wellness applications. In contrast to gate analysis, wearable sensor-based evaluation of the upper body activities is not well studied. The work in this paper...

Wireless embedded platforms play a significant role in Wireless Health: For many hidden medical conditions, symptoms may not reveal during traditional clinical visits. Cumulative, free-living monitoring, where individuals are monitored continuously with the use of wireless electronics and sensors, is considered a potential solution for capturing ad...

Continued rapid progress in the development of embedded motion sensing enables wearable devices that provide fundamental advances in the capability to monitor and classify human motion, detect movement disorders, and estimate energy expenditure. With this progress, it is becoming possible to provide, for the first time, evaluation of outcomes of re...

Pressure Ulcer (PU) incidence leads to considerable risk, in particular for the frail elderly, and a large national healthcare treatment cost. Evidence-based methods for assuring the health and safety of patients are urgently needed. Recent clinical trials have demonstrated that sub-epidermal moisture (SEM) present in tissue may be measured by inte...

Using a scanning tunnelling microscope tip formed by cutting a platinum wire, we have modified the surfaces of gold and Hg1-xCdxTe on a nanometre scale by mechanical contact between the tip and the surface. By using the same tip to form images, we have been able to gain ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of surfaces that have been selectively ‘sanded’,...

Advancement in wireless health sensor systems has triggered rapidly expanding research in continuous activity monitoring for chronic disease management or promotion and assessment of physical rehabilitation. Wireless motion sensing is increasingly important in treatments where remote collection of sensor measurements can provide an in-field objecti...

We recently used the Atom LEAP as the foundation for CS 188, an undergraduate research seminar investigat-ing potential trade-offs between security and energy con-sumption in a hypothetical, battery-powered tablet de-vice. Twenty-three students, in five groups, researched the energy costs of full disk encryption, network cryptog-raphy, and sandboxi...

Continued rapid progress in cost reduction, energy efficiency, and new data transport architectures for body worn sensors enables remote monitoring of patient activity with critical focus and impact on successful outcomes in healthcare. Monitoring systems, composed of both sensor and signal processing systems, seek to provide the capability to clas...

Outcome measures of mobility for large stroke trials are limited to timed walks for short distances in a laboratory, step counters and ordinal scales of disability and quality of life. Continuous monitoring and outcome measurements of the type and quantity of activity in the community would provide direct data about daily performance, including com...

In this paper, we describe a physical activity classification system using a body sensor network (BSN) consisting of costsensitive tri-axial accelerometers. We focus on workspace activities (different motions and sitting postures). We use a Naive Bayes classifier and show that we can train the system simply and systematically. For each task, we fin...

This paper describes a novel online tool, Individualized, Interactive Instruction (3i), that enables new instructional approaches based on formative assessment. The 3i system provides real-time feedback from students to instructors in the classroom. 3i directly displays each student's progress on specific problem solving tasks that reveal understan...

Physical rehabilitation has become increasingly important for subjects recovering from treatment in clinics and from disease conditions including stroke [6]. A particularly critical requirement is the support of individuals who suffer from impaired mobility or may be confined to beds, yet must be provided with an assured fitness promotion regimen....

Patients' skin integrity has long been an issue of concern in nursing homes and hospitals. Overall incidence of pressure ulcers for hospitalized patients is as high as 50%. The estimated cost of treating pressure ulcers ranges from $5,000 to $40,000 for each ulcer, depending on severity. A smart compact capacitive sensing wireless handheld system i...

The need for efficient monitoring of spatio-temporal dynamics in large environmental surveillance applications motivates the use of robotic sensors to achieve sufficient spatial and temporal coverage. A common approach in machine learning to model spatial dynamics is to use the nonparametric Bayesian framework known as Gaussian Processes (GPs) (c.f...

We present a novel Weighted Barrier Function (WBF) method of efficiently computing optimal grasping force distributions for multifingered hands. Second-order conic friction constraints are not linearized, as in many previous works. The force distributions are smooth and rapidly computable, and they enable flexibility in selecting between firm, stab...

AutoGait is a mobile platform that autonomously discovers a user's walking profile and accurately estimates the distance walked. The discovery is made by utilizing the GPS in the user's mobile device when the user is walking outdoors. This profile can then be used both indoors and outdoors to estimate the distance walked. To model the person's walk...

In this paper, we present a novel linear-program formulation that yields "optimally safe" (OS) tension distributions in parallel cable-driven robots by the introduction of a slack variable. The slack variable also enables explicit computation of a near-optimal, feasible starting point. This, in turn, enables rapid computation of the OS tension dist...

This Technical Report provides a review of a new embedded computing platform enabling research, education and training, and product development based on the Intel Atom processor architecture. This introduces a dramatic advance in the capability for direct characterization of energy and power dissipation in embedded computing platforms and the assoc...

Many sensing applications require monitoring phenomena with complex spatio-temporal dynamics spread over large spatial domains. Efficient monitoring of such phenomena would require an impractically large number of static sensors; therefore, actuated sensing - mobile robots carrying sensors - is required. Path planning for these robots, i.e., decidi...

Questions pertaining to stream restoration ecology, environmental flows, and hydrology may require higher resolution observation and simulation capabilities than are typical of hydrologic investigations. Multi-dimensional models can provide more insight into the coupled biogeochemical processes needed to fully understand these systems. Of course, s...

Researchers at the La Selva Biological Station are studying the exchange of CO 2 between the atmosphere and dense plant life in the Costa Rican rainforest. The wireless measurement technology deployed at the site is a networked infomechanical system (NIMS) based on National Instruments LabView software and CompactRio hardware. A mobile, wireless, a...

For many communities around the world, seawater and brackish water desalination is increasingly becoming a necessity for augmenting dwindling fresh water supplies. At present, reverse osmosis desalination is the leading technology for brackish and seawater desalination. Widespread implementation of RO technology, however, remains a challenge due to...

The challenge of monitoring food intake can be facilitated by the truly transformational power of mobile phones. Mobile phones provide a pervasive and fairly ubiquitous infrastructure, which we leverage to provide cost-effective, high quality aids to behavior monitoring and modification. Additionally, the technology allows public health messages to...

The feasibility of operating brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) desalination in a feed flow reversal (FFR) mode so as to mitigate mineral scaling was evaluated with feed solutions containing calcium, sodium, sulfate and chloride ions. The premise of the FFR approach is to enable dissolution of surface mineral crystals, that form first at the BWR...

Energy efficiency presents a critical design challenge in wireless, wearable sensor technology, mainly because of the associated diagnostic objectives required in each monitoring application. In order to maximize the operating lifetime during real-life monitoring and maintain sufficient classification accuracy, the wearable sensors require hardware...

In this paper, we present results from a field-test of NIMS-PL, a redundantly actuated cable-driven robot for aquatic applications. We describe installation procedures that enable rapid deployability and present results demonstrating precise calibration capabilities. Detection and correction of positional drift, which is critical for long-term auto...

Recently there has been a rapid growth in a new area of research known asWireless Health.1 By leveraging stateof- the-art microelectronics and wireless technology, novel biosensing platforms can potentially be widely deployed in various healthcare applications that involve long-term patient monitoring. This paper provides a summary on the developme...

This paper presents a study of the five best selling Smart Phones in terms of their applicability to Wireless Health. Smart Phones are generally used as central controlling units in Wireless Health applications. We carried out our investigation by implementing a wireless health application that performs sensor communication, data processing, and da...

Interval training consists of interleaving high intensity exercises with rest periods. This training method is a well known exercise protocol which helps strengthen and improve one’s cardiovascular fitness. However, there is no known methodfor formulating and tailoring an optimized interval training protocol for a specific individual which maximize...

We present NIMS3D, a novel 3-D cabled robot for actuated sensing applications. We provide a brief overview of the main hardware components. Next, we describe installation procedures, including novel calibration methods, that enable rapid in-field deployability for nonexpert end users, and provide simulations and experimental results to highlight th...

Fall-induced injury has become a leading cause of death for the elderly. Many elderly people rely on canes as an assis-tive device to overcome problems such as balance disorder and leg weakness, which are believed to have led to many incidents of falling. In this paper, we present the design and the implementation of SmartFall, an automatic fall de...

Plant phenology relates strongly to primary productivity and the energy that enters into ecological food webs, and thus is vital in understanding ecosystem function and the effects of climate and climate change. The manual collection of phenological data is labor-intensive and not easily scalable, thus the ability to quantify leaf flush and other p...

We consider a wireless network with distributed processing capabilities for estimation or detection applications. Due to limited communication resources, the network selects only a subset of sensor measurements for estimation or detection as long as the resulting fidelity is tolerable. We present a distributed sampling scheme based on the concept o...

The need for efficient monitoring of spatio-temporal dynamics in large environmental applica- tions, such as the water quality monitoring in rivers and lakes, motivates the use of robotic sensors in order to achieve sufficient spatial coverage. Typically, these robots have bounded resources, such as limited battery or limited amounts of time to obt...

Many robotic path planning applications, such as search and rescue, involve uncertain environments with complex dynamics that can be only partially observed. When selecting the best subset of ob- servation locations subject to constrained resources (such as limited time or battery capacity) it is an im- portant problem to trade off exploration (gat...

Modern day sensor network technology has shown great promise to transform environmental data collection. However, despite the promise, these systems have remained the purview of the engineers and computer scientists who design them rather than a useful tool for the environmental scientists who need them. SensorKit is conceived of as a way to make w...

Cabled robotic systems have been used for a diverse set of applications such as environmental sensing, search and rescue, sports and entertainment and air vehicle simulators. In this paper, we introduce a new cabled robot- Networked Info Mechanical System for Planar actuation (NIMS-PL), with energy profiling capabilities. Accurate energy measuremen...

A wireless network of buoys, two autonomous robotic boats, and an autonomous tethered vertical profiling system were used to characterize phytoplankton dynamics and spatiotemporal changes in chemical and physical forcing factors in a small montane lake (Lake Fulmor, Idyllwild, California). Three deployments each year were conducted in 2005 and 2006...

The usage of conventional assistive cane devices is critical in reducing the risk of falls, which are particularly detrimental to the elderly and disabled. Individuals that experience the greatest risks rely on cane devices for support of ambulation. Results of many studies, however, have shown that incorrect cane usage is prevalent among cane user...

As concern for water resource availability increases, so does the need for intelligent aquatic sensing applications. The requirements, and complexity of such applications has also increased due to demands for: 1) broad spatial coverage and high spatial resolution monitoring, 2) capability for resolving fine scale spatiotemporal dynamics and 3) the...

In this paper we describe an algorithm to generate energy efficient trajectories for NIMS3D, a three-dimensional cabled robotic platform. Optimized parabolic paths are used to exploit the relatively low I2R loss associated with operation in lower regions of the workspace. Trajectory optimization is sufficiently fast to enable real time operation. E...

High fidelity data acquisition of dynamic spatiotemporal phenomena for aquatic environmental research suggests the use of actuated sensors. Furthermore, characterization of the floor in aquatic environments is beneficial for environmental science, as well as can be applied to robot localization. The NIMS AQ cable robot platform is designed to meet...

The usage of conventional assistive cane devices is critical in reducing the risk of falls, which are particularly detrimental for the elderly and disabled. Many of the individuals that experience the greatest risk of falling rely on cane devices for support of ambulation. However, the results of many studies have shown that incorrect cane usage is...

This paper describes a new embedded networked sensor platform architecture that combines hardware and software tools providing detailed, fine-grained real-time energy usage information. We introduce the LEAP2 platform, a qualitative step forward over the previously developed LEAP and other similar platforms. LEAP2 is based on anew low power ASIC sy...

Presented work highlights the development and initial validation of a medical embedded device for individualized care (MEDIC), which is based on a novel software architecture, enabling sensor management and disease prediction capabilities, and commercially available microelectronic components, sensors and conventional personal digital assistant (PD...

Over the past decades, the aging infrastructure of wastewater collection system (WCS) has endangered the public health by contaminating the sources of drinking water and by polluting the natural environment. The dangers caused by discharging untreated wastewater have been repeatedly proclaimed by academia, industries, and public sectors. As numerou...

Virtual proprioception is a novel device for providing near autonomous biofeedback of hemiparetic gait disparity in real time. With virtual proprioception a user may modify gait dynamics to develop a more suitable gait in tandem with real time feedback. Accelerometers are fundamental to the operation of the device, and a thorough consideration of t...

The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in general purpose computing has been shown to incur significant performance benefits, for applications ranging from scientific computing to database sorting and search. The emergence of high-level APIs facilitates GPU programming to the point that general purpose computing with GPUs is now considered a v...

Falls are currently a leading cause of death from injury in the elderly. The usage of conventional assistive cane devices is critical in reducing the risk of falls and is relied upon by over 4 million patients in the U.S. While canes provide physical support as well as supplementary sensing feedback to pa-tients, at the same time, these conventiona...

Extended system lifetime is a critical requirement for wearable sensor platforms. However, these platforms must also accommodate local data processing, data storage, and broadband wireless communications. Since compact battery storage capacity is constrained, there exists a fundamental tradeoff between energy optimization and performance. Furthermo...

Spatially distributed hydraulic and water quality property characterization is important to understanding a broad range of river issues including confluence and discharge mixing phenomena, groundwater-surface water exchanges, and flow and temperature distributions in the context of habitat restoration efforts. Such characterization efforts often ne...

Large-scale environmental sensing, e.g., understanding microbial processes in an aquatic ecosystem, requires coordination across a multidisciplinary team of experts working closely with a robotic sensing and sampling system. We describe a human-robot team that conducted an aquatic sampling campaign in Lake Fulmor, San Jacinto Mountains Reserve, Cal...

An integrated real-time distributed observing system could transform the understanding of the earth's water and related biogeochemical cycles across multiple spatial and temporal scales to enable improved forecasting and management of critical water processes affected by human activities.

Motion may be used in sensor networks to change the network configuration for improving the sensing performance. We consider the problem of controlling motion in a distributed manner for a mobile sensor network for a specific form of motion capability. Mobility itself may have a high resource overhead, hence we exploit motility, a constrained form...

In this paper we present algorithms that enable precise trajectory control of NIMS3D, an underconstrained, three-dimensional cabled robot intended for use in actuated sensing. We begin by offering a brief system overview and then describe methods to determine the range of operation of the robot. Next, a discrete-time model of the system is presente...

Embedded network systems (ENS) provide a set of technologies that can link the physical world to large-scale networks in applications, such as monitoring of borders, infrastructure, health, the environment, automated production, supply chains, homes, and places of business. This book details the fundamentals for this interdisciplinary and fast-movi...

This paper presents an incremental diagnosis method (IDM) to detect a medical condition with the minimum wearable sensor usage by dynamically adjusting the sensor set based on the patient's state in his/her natural environment. The IDM, comprised of a naive Bayes classifier generated by supervised training with Gaussian clustering, is developed to...

Traditional embedded systems require flexibility and reconfigurable for effective operation. Devices used in medical systems that are life critical must be able to take the necessary action in response to an anomaly, such as the patient undergoing a heart attack or a stroke. Overly complicated operational requirements will be a clear barrier to the...

This paper reports the first application of iterative experi mental design methodol- ogy for high spatiotemporal resolution characterization of river and lake aquatic systems per- formed using mobile robot sensing systems. Both applications involve dynamic phenomena spread over large spatial domain: 1) Characterization of contaminant concentration...

Low-cost sensors and wireless systems can now create a constantly vigilant and pervasive monitoring capability at home, at work, and in conventional point-of-care environments. While progress in this area is underway in sensor technology, mobile computing platforms, and data transport, barriers to large scale application remain ahead, particularly...

This paper considers an estimation network of many distributed sensors with a certain correlation structure. Due to limited communication resources, the network selects only a subset of sensor measurements for estimation as long as the resulting fidelity is tolerable. We present a distributed sampling and estimation framework based on innovations d...

Dual-radio, dual-processor nodes are an emerging class of wireless sensor network devices that provide both low-energy operation as well as substantially increased computational performance and communication bandwidth for applications. In such systems, the secondary radio and processor operates with sufficiently low power that it may remain always...