Volume 10, Number 3 • May/June 2002 • Small Business/SBIR

Health-Monitoring Toolkit Can
Accelerate Innovation

Dryden Flight Research Center has initiated an SBIR project with Creare, Inc. to develop a suite of Java-based object-oriented software tools to aid the design, analysis, implementation and use of cost-effective distributed health management systems. Photo provided by Dryden Flight Research Center.

Widespread use of online health management has the potential to deliver useful maintenance information and safety-related situational awareness while reducing lifecycle costs of equipment. This is why there is an increasing emphasis on health management and condition-based maintenance systems in engines, vehicles, factories and homes. Health management concepts are maturing and warrant experimentation, but the lack of software toolkits remains an obstacle for health-monitoring system designers, systems integrators and users. Existing solutions written for specific platforms to monitor specific subsystems tend to be costly and rarely get integrated into larger system-wide information management infrastructure. Online, automated techniques must be considered when latencies in delivering derived knowledge to the decision-makers adversely affect safety and efficiency.

NASA Dryden has initiated an SBIR project with Creare, Inc., of Hanover, NH, to develop a suite of Java-based object-oriented software tools to aid the design, analysis, implementation and use of cost-effective distributed health management systems. While object-oriented paradigms with graphical interfaces are revolutionizing many fields, distributed health monitoring evolves toward intelligent decision support systems involving sensors, signal processing and a consequential need to analyze both current and historical data from a number of often-changing data sources and types. The Ring Buffered Network Bus (RBNB), a network data cache implemented as a hierarchical peer-to-peer high-performance information-sharing environment, is used in this project and is an ideal solution for this type of application. RBNB is itself the result of prior NASA SBIR commercialization efforts.

The goal of this project is to implement an advanced environment for engineering health-monitoring systems comprised of elementary entities like sensors and algorithms (virtual sensors) assembled into components, subsystems and systems. Through the capabilities enabled by RBNB, development activities like simulation, rapid prototyping, support of multiple users on distributed teams and integration of third-party software are straightforward and reduce the risks to the success of this project. In effect, the project goal is to create a distributed collaborative environment for the engineering of distributed collaborative health-monitoring software. The expected result is distributed intelligent data processing and decision making that reduces bandwidth requirements through distributed processing while increasing data availability through network buffering and Web-based report delivery. A key capability of the toolkit will be to enable the configuration and initiation of remote algorithms that can consolidate raw sensor data into relevant health information at multiple levels and locations, significantly reducing network bandwidth requirements. In-depth data is still available for decision making through health reports, which may be generated automatically or on demand at the system, subsystem or sensor levels, and viewed with a standard Web browser. Q

For more information, contact Larry Freudinger at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, 661/276-3542, l.freudinger@dfrc.nasa.gov. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

NASA Official: Jonathan Root • Web Design: Printing & Design Office, NASA Headquarters • Credits