Indian American professor receives $550K grant from NSF for smart technologies

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NEW YORK – Nirmala Roy, an Indian American assistant professor of information systems at the University of Maryland, has received a CAREER Award by the National Science Foundation to advance his research on smart home technologies and wearable devices.

According to a university press release, Roy has also received a $550,000 grant which will him in his endeavor to design, develop, implement and evaluate in-home technologies with applications related to healthcare and smart computing, for the next five years.

Through this award, Roy will develop algorithms and create Cross-domain Autonomous Health Assessment technology that can account for the broad range of information reported by diverse users and their devices.

According to the press release, CATS will build upon Roy’s previous work and will take a closer look at how combining multiple smart home technologies and wearable sensors can offer a more comprehensive understanding of a user’s everyday activities, particularly relating to the long-term health of older adults and people with disabilities.

Roy will then focus on analyzing consistencies and variations in habits among people who use smart home devices and wearable sensors.

“The smart home technologies proposed in this project can decrease the number of medical specialist visits and overall healthcare costs, and increase patient satisfaction and quality of life. Making these internet-of-things devices work in unison and mitigating the disparities across their sensing, sampling, energy, privacy, and accuracy inference are significant issues,” Roy said in his CAREER proposal.

Roy will be working with UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program, Center for Women in Technology and Shriver Center, as well as Baltimore City Public Schools, to connect with student researchers and with community members who might want to participate in or learn about his work on smart home health technologies and eldercare.