More than 15% of the population suffers from some forms of respiratory disorders (e.g. Asthma, Bronchitis, Sleep Apnea, etc.) and some of such disorders can be acute. Currently, physicians perform such diagnosis by listening to lung sound using a stethoscope. The problem of this existing approach is that, the history of occurrence is important and yet patients. descriptions are often erroneous. Furthermore, auscultation with stethoscope is subjective and cannot be used for longduration monitoring too. The emerging trend is therefore to monitor respiratory disorders in a home setting through the use of a wearable system. This lecture will focus on presenting the findings generated from a joint research program undertaken by the lecturer and his engineering team at NTU and the physicians at the National University Hospital (Singapore). In particular, the monitoring of two types of respiratory disorders: wheeze based (e.g. Asthma) and snore based (e.g. Sleep Apnea disorder) will be discussed. In addition to presenting the typical characteristics of such signals, the lecture will also address the problems imposed by the wearable constraint and discuss the algorithms and system solutions to these problems. The development of algorithms and the associated circuits and systems has evolved through three generations of designs. The problems faced and the findings obtained for these designs will be shared at the lecture. A demonstration of the effectiveness of some of these techniques and designs will be given during the lecture too.

Biography

Associate Professor Wee Ser received his B.Sc. (Hon) and Ph.D. degrees both in EEE from the Loughborough University, UK, in 1978 and 1982 respectively. He joined the Defence Science Organization (DSO) in 1982 and became Head of the Communications Research Division in 1993. In 1996, he was appointed Technological Advisor to the CEO of DSO National Laboratories. In 1997, he joined the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and has since been appointed Director of the Centre for Signal Processing. Wee Ser is currently the associate editors for the IEEE Communications Letters and the Journal of Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing (Springer). He is a senior IEEE member and a member of a TC in the IEEE Circuit and System Society. He has served in the RCM of ISCAS 2009 and ISCAS 2010, as Chair of the local IEEE Signal Processing Chapter, and in the local IEEE Communications Chapter. He has served as track chair of several international conferences and has served in the International Advisory Committee of an IEEE Signal Processing Workshop on DSP and as a panel chair of an International DAB Symposium. More recently, he was invited as a keynote speaker for ICSIPA.09 (IEEE Conference of Signal and Image Processing Applications). He has also served in several national advisory and technical committees. He is a board director of a public listed company and an honour advisor to the Seattle Technology. He has published about 120 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences. He holds six patents (including 4 US patents) and is a co-author of four book chapters. He is the Principal Investigator of several research projects (with about US$2m of grants from the Ministry of Education, A*STAR, DSO National Laboratories, and the industries). He has been shortlisted for the EEE Teaching Excellence Award from 2007 to 2009. Wee Ser was a recipient of the Colombo Plan scholarship and the PSC postgraduate scholarship. He was awarded the IEE Prize during his studies in UK. While in DSO, he was a recipient of the prestigious Defence Technology (Individual) Prize 1991 and the DSO Excellent Award 1992. His research interests include microphone array research, wearable signal processing system design; integrated audio-video based monitoring system design, signal classification techniques, and channel estimation and equalization.