Professor Dr. Mini Thomas completes her PhD
Mohawk College professor, Dr. Mini Thomas recently completed her PhD in Software Engineering from McMaster University.
After six years of working on her PhD, Dr. Thomas successfully defended her thesis titled 'Quantifying Trust in Wearable Medical Devices,’ in September 2024.
First coming to the college in 2016, Dr. Thomas started as a lab coordinator, part-time professor and researcher before obtaining a full-time faculty position. Having previously completed a Master of Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, she was looking to expand her knowledge.
“I wanted to do something related to digital health. That has been my passion since childhood. In a meeting with my previous Associate Dean, she encouraged me to pursue a PhD,” Dr. Thomas says. “You know when you need that last push? That was it for me.”
Beginning her PhD in 2018, Dr. Thomas was completing her theoretical work as the pandemic broke out. Digital medical wearables were becoming increasingly popular during that time and Dr. Thomas saw an opportunity to study them more. “My research could be valuable to a general audience to know how they can trust wearable medical devices,” says Dr. Thomas.
Through her research, she sought to quantify trust.
“To quantify something subjective is a challenge in itself. So, my first goal was to identify the factors impacting trust from a stakeholder's perspective. A set of parameters were validated by empirical study, regulatory standards and literature. The second goal was to find a way to quantify the subjective nature of trust based on the identified factors into a measurable value,” she says.
“There is no gold standard for trust measurement. There is not a particular device that all other devices are compared to. This area for wearable medical devices is still evolving,” she explains. For her thesis, she developed a customizable parametrized Artificial Intelligence (AI) model to provide a quantifiable measure of trust. The measure is relative and provides a method to compare trust based on factors most influential from a stakeholder's perspective. Her research compared three devices.
For example, an athlete wearing a wearable device they may be most interested in privacy features, their doctor may be most interested in the accuracy of the device's sensors, and a family member may be most interested in the security of the device against hacking. The model would recommend the best device based on each stakeholder’s top trustworthiness factor.
To ensure the reliability of the data, Dr. Thomas tested the devices in both noisy environments like busy parks and quieter spaces like a private home. She also tested them in both cold and warm climates.
The last part of her thesis study required Dr. Thomas to test her findings. To expand upon her real datasets, she used synthetic data to verify the model she created. It was a success. Her model provides a method to compare trustworthiness of wearables considering different trust determining factors.
Congratulations Dr. Mini Thomas!
Interested in learning more about Dr. Mini Thomas’s thesis work? Please reach out to her at mini.thomas@mohawkcollege.ca.
You can also learn more about Dr. Thomas’s previous research work through Prof develops seizure detection tool on Newsdesk.