Hahn Receives NSF CAREER Award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Jin-Oh Hahn a 2018 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project “Enabling ‘White-Box’ Autonomy in Medical Cyber-Physical Systems.”

This award will support Hahn’s research into autonomous healthcare (in particular, physiological closed-loop control), conducted in the Laboratory for Control and Information Systems.

With this funding, Hahn will develop tools and methodologies for medical cyber-physical systems (M-CPS) with the ultimate goal of improving autonomy in healthcare. He believes this research will advance the development and evaluation approaches for safe, efficacious, and robust automation suited to healthcare applications.

In the past, autonomous medical systems were less successful as they could not be easily interpreted by the clinicians using them. Some of these reasons include: automation performed a specified task without considering the overall state of the patient; multiple automations that were not aligned to avoid conflicts; and that these autonomous systems were often prone to errors and failures.

Hahn’s research aims to solve many of these problems. He will use this funding to develop methodological framework to build medical automations that can respond to a patient’s current state of health in various circulatory resuscitation scenarios. Hahn specifically will investigate (1) control-oriented mathematical modeling for a patient’s physiological and pharmacological state in response to medication therapies, and (2) coordinated and resilient multivariable closed-loop control based on such mathematical models. These models and algorithms will be “white-box,” meaning these models will be interpretable by clinicians. He will also leverage his close tie with the FDA to investigate novel regulatory science methodologies for M-CPS and physiological closed-loop control systems. With these innovative tools and algorithms, Hahn’s research may shape future M-CPS / physiological closed-loop control paradigms as well as creating next-generation students and professionals equipped with M-CPS expertise.

"Prior autonomy capabilities in medicine have not been suitably mature for real-world critical care, due to the limitations in a few facets.” says Hahn. “I intend to establish an integrated research, education, and outreach program to develop and demonstrate generalizable tools and methodologies for context-aware and interpretable “white-box” autonomy for coordinated, resilient physiological closed-loop control that can be easily supervised by human clinicians.”

Hahn is a Member of ASME and a Senior Member of IEEE. In 2014, he was awarded the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award. With the NSF CAREER award, he joins Professor Miao Yu and Affiliate Professor S.K. Gupta as being recipients of both an NSF CAREER and ONR YIP Award.

Published April 2, 2018