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Assistant Professor

kurian.polachan@iiitb.ac.in

Education : Ph.D. (IISc Bangalore)

Prof. Kurian Polachan is a hands-on systems engineer with research interests in body sensing, body communication and connected wearables. He currently works as Assistant Professor at IIIT-Bangalore. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021-2022 in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, working on ultra-low power biomedical wearable designs and human-body communication. He received Ph.D. in 2021 from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), working on tactile-CPS and time-sensitive networking and an MTech in 2014 from DESE (formerly CEDT), Indian Institute of Science in electronics design and technology. He has over 5 years of industry research experience with Cypress Semiconductors (now Infineon Technologies), developing capacitive touch sensing user-interface solutions. While in Academia and Industry, he has authored/co-authored 12 journal/conference publications, including 9 first-author publications in selective venues (IEEE/ACM TON, ACM TOIT, IEEE TNSM, IEEE SECON, ACM/IEEE ICCPS, IFIP IM, IEEE COMSNETS, etc.), related to tactile-CPS and time-sensitive networking, and internal conferences (CITEC 2009, CITEC 2011), application notes~(AN66269, AN56007, AN2397), articles (EDN, EETimes), whitepaper and code examples related to capacitive touch sensing technologies. Towards serving the community, he has been a reviewer for IEEE TBioCAS, IEEE Access, Springer Nature, MDPI Networks, ISNCC-2022 WMN, and Govt of India's Swadeshi Microprocessor Challenge. He has also done several collaborative works in Academia and Industry (on-body wearable prototypes with Eli Lilly and Company USA, tactile-CPS designs with a research group at TU Delft Netherlands, developing novel touch-sensing solutions for electronic products with Whirlpool, NEC, Sharp, etc.).

Connected Devices and Wearables Lab

Lab at IIIT-B managed by Prof. Kurian Polachan. Webpage (Link),

The lab focusses on researching hardware and systems for connected devices and wearables constituting Internet of Bodies (IoB). IoB is an extension of IoT, wherein connected things in, on and around the human body senses and share vital information about the body to remote servers in the cloud for continuous and long-time monitoring of the individual and surroundings.

Openings

PhD, M.S. Research, and Research Assistant Positions available.

Expected Skillset – Embedded Systems, Analog Circuits (off-chip), Python Programming, PCB Design

Interested and motivated students, can contact me at kurian.polachan@iiitb.ac.in with your CV, a brief description of your research interests and relevant research (or product development) experiences.

Research Interests
Selected Publications
Teaching

Wearables for Internet of Bodies (IoB)

Design of low power wearables capable of harvesting energy from the body (e.g., energy from body heat) for long-term battery free sensing and communication.

Ultra-Low Power and Secure Communication

Explore different modalities of secure and ultra-low-power short-range communication between wearable devices and between wearable devices and off-body transceivers. (e.g., human body communication, capacitive communication, magnetic communication)

Hardware Security

Develop hardware security measures to protect the wearable devices from unauthorized access or replacements (e.g., PUFs for wearables)

Journals

[J6] (Preprint) [Co-First Author] Shreeya Sriram, Kurian Polachan, Shreyas Sen "On the Interaction of Biopotential Sensing and Right Leg Drive System with Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication, 2022
[J5] Kurian Polachan , Joydeep Pal, Chandramani Singh and Prabhakar T. Venkata, "Assessing Quality of Control in Tactile Cyber-Physical Systems", IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2022
[J4] Kurian Polachan , Chandramani Singh and Prabhakar T. Venkata, "Decentralized Dynamic Scheduling of TCPS flows and a Simulator for Time-Sensitive Networking", ACM Transactions on Interent Technology, 2022
[J3] Kurian Polachan , Joydeep Pal, Prabhakar T. Venkata , Chandramani Singh , and Fernando A. Kuipers, "TCPSbed: A Modular Testbed for Tactile Internet based Cyber-Physical Systems", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 2021
[J2] Kurian Polachan, Baibhab Chatterjee, Scott Weigand, and Shreyas Sen. 2021. "Human Body–Electrode Interfaces for Wide-Frequency Sensing and Communication: A Review" Nanomaterials 11, no. 8: 2152.
[J1] Daniël Van Den Berg , Rebecca Glans , Dorian De Koning , Fernando A. Kuipers, Jochem Lugtenburg, Kurian Polachan , Prabhakar T. Venkata , Chandramani Singh , Belma Turkovic , And Bryan Van Wijk , "Challenges in Haptic Communications Over the Tactile Internet", IEEE Access 2017

Conferences

[C7] Kurian Polachan, Chandramani Singh, T Venkata Prabhakar, "Decentralized Dynamic Gate Scheduling of IEEE 802.1Qbv Time Aware Shaper and a TSN Simulator for Tactile Cyber-Physical Systems", 17th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, IM 2021,Bordeaux, France.
[C6] Kurian Polachan, Belma Turkovic, Chandramani Singh, T Venkata Prabhakar, Fernando A. Kuipers, "Dynamic Network Slicing for Tactile Internet", 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, ICCPS 2020 at CPS Week 2020, Sydney, Australia.
[C5] Kurian Polachan, T Venkata Prabhakar, Chandramani Singh, Deepak Panchapakesan, "Quality of Control Assessment for Tactile Cyber Physical Systems", 16th IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking, IEEE SECON 2019 at Boston, USA.
[C4] Kurian Polachan, T Venkata Prabhakar, Chandramani Singh, Fernando A. Kuipers, "Towards an Open Testbed for Tactile Cyber Physical Systems", 11th 11th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS, COMSNETS 2019 at Bangalore, India.
[C3] Arjun N, Ashwin S M, Kurian Polachan, T V Prabhakar, and Chandramani Singh , "An End To End Tactile Cyber Physical System Design", 4th International Workshop on Emerging Ideas and Trends in Engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems at CPS Week 2018 at Porto, Portugal.
[C2] Kurian Polachan, and Vibheesh B "Automated CapSense Testing with Active Capacitance Simulation Circuit", Cypress International Technical Conference (CITEC) 2011
[C1] Shivendra Kumar Singh, Kurian Polachan and Vibheesh B, "Conference Paper "Automated Testing for CapSense Products", Cypress International Technical Conference (CITEC) 2009

Arxiv

[Co-First Author] Shreeya Sriram, Kurian Polachan, Shreyas Sen "On the Interaction of Biopotential Sensing and Right Leg Drive System with Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication, 2022, (Link)

Articles, Application Notes and User Guides

Sachin Gupta, Prakhar Goyal, and Kurian Polachan “Designing Reliable Touch Interfaces for White Goods", Cypress Semiconductors, 2013.
Sachin Gupta, Prakhar Goyal, and Kurian Polachan “Designing Reliable Capacitive Touch interfaces”. Published in EETimes, Goliath, NXT Book and DSP Embedded, 2011
Kurian Polachan [Main Contributor] "AN66269 CapsSense Design Guide for the CY8C20x34 family of devices", Cypress Semiconductors, 2012
Kurian Polachan "Application note AN2397 on CapSense Data Viewing Tools", Cypress Semiconductors, 2011
Kurian Polachan "Application note AN56007 on I2C Enhanced Slave Operation", Cypress Semiconductors, 2009
Kurian Polachan [Main Contributor] "CY3280-SmartSense™ CapSense® Auto-Tuning Kit Guide ", Cypress Semiconductors, 2010
Kurian Polachan [Main Contributor] "CY3280-BK1 Universal CapSense® Controller Basic Kit 1 User Guide ", Cypress Semiconductors, 2011

Demonstrations

TCPS Demonstration @ Dutch Technology Demonstration at Taj West End, Bangalore, 2018
TCPS Demonstration @ Cyber Physical Systems Symposium at RBCCPS, IISc Bangalore, 2017

Year 2023, ESS 102 Digital Design

The course covers the following topics: number systems and logic gates, electronic design of logic gates, design of combination circuits, design of sequential circuits, design of digital blocks, finite state machine, and introduction to hardware description language.

Year 2023, VL 864 Embedded Systems Design

The course introduces students to several electronic systems design concepts such as hierarchical design methodologies, mixed-signal components, embedded computers, low-power design, thermal design, ESD, EMI/EMC, PCB design etc.,