Maria Ebling ’88, research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y., is working in an area called context-aware computing that allows a device to be more responsive to a user’s needs. Ebling’s focus these days is examining ways to improve healthcare through mobile computing.

With her team of seven full-time employees, Ebling is working on a prototype remote care monitoring system targeted at people with chronic conditions such as diabetes and congestive heart failure.

“The system lets people take biometric readings, such as their heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels and the like, in their own home,” said Ebling, a former mathematics major (computer science option) and Carnegie Mellon graduate (M.S. and Ph.D.). “It sends those readings to the back-end system, where they can be monitored by care providers and eventually where the computing systems can look for trends and issues. The goal is to identify emerging problems early so that they can be treated.”

Ebling said this is a win-win proposition because the patient potentially receives the intervention earlier and the insurer helps the person seek treatment as an out-patient rather than in the emergency room, a higher-cost environment.

While the benefits are clear, context-aware computing has some privacy issues. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations strictly control the release of personally identifiable information (PII), said Ebling. “Because the biometric readings that our system manages are examples of PII, we must be very careful how we manage the security and privacy of this information. One component that I insisted that we include in our early work on context-aware computing was privacy protection. We now have a privacy engine that allows users to control the release of their context information.”

This context-aware project was the first time that Ebling and others on her team had gone through the formal development process required to make an IBM product. “I found the experience exciting in that we were going to see our research go out the door and into customer hands.”

A full time job, a family that includes husband, Chris Okasaki ’89, a civilian computer science teacher at West Point, and two children, ages 10 and 5, keep her busy and challenged, but she said the Mudd experience has helped her manage. “Mudd taught me how to learn, how to work hard, how to juggle too much work, how to persevere,” she said. “Mudd taught me not to be intimidated (too much) by the machines—be they computers or lathes or oscilloscopes. And, Mudd taught me how to approach research problems, ones where there is no known ‘right answer.’”

Ebling also manages the care of her father who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in March 2003. While he is clear of cancer, the ongoing treatments have been very hard on him, she said. “One of the exciting aspects of my current research work is the belief that someday the results of this work will help people like my father maintain their mobility and their quality of life.”