NSF seeks innovative proposals for their new FY 2011“Smart Health and Wellbeing” program. The goal of the program to improve services in patient-centered health and wellness services through innovations and computer and information science and engineering.
Some of the suggested areas for proposals include:
• Protecting patient privacy by providing new security and cryptographic solutions
• Improving personalized medicine with advances in information retrieval, data mining, and decision support software systems
• Providing for continuous monitoring with remote and networked sensors and actuators, mobile platforms, novel interactive displays, and advances in computing and networking infrastructure
• Data collected by sensors at clinic and labs needs to be aggregated for community-wide health awareness
• Study of virtual worlds, robotics, image, and natural language understanding can be used to deliver more efficient healthcare
• Software-controlled and interoperable medical devices are necessary to provide safe critical care
• Healthcare systems and applications have to match the mental model of users so that people make appropriate decisions.
There are three project classes:
• Small projects up to $500,000 total budget with durations up to three years. The full proposal is due from December 1, 2010 to December 17, 2010
• Medium projects from $500,000 to $1,200,000 with durations up to four years. The full proposal is due September 1, 2010 to September 15, 2010
• Large projects from $1,200,000 to $3,000,000 total budget with durations up to five years. The full proposal is due November 1, 2010 to November 28, 2010
The contact for the program is Thomas Henderson, email thenders@nsf.gov or call (703) 292-8930. For more details, go to www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503556&org=CNS
In other news, NSF awarded a three year $7.5 million grant to a Rutgers-led research team to find a way for the internet to be optimized for mobile networking and communication. The team of nine universities and several industrial partners has dubbed the project “MobilityFirst” reflecting the internet’s drive towards wireless data services on mobile platforms.
The research team will address technical issues, involving reliable data networking in spite of variations in wireless signal quality and strength and the team will also work on how to route traffic across the burgeoning number of nodes in the internet. At the same time, the researchers will address security and privacy needs in both mobile and wired networks and explore how the network can best support features such as location awareness.
