Finishing Hanoi University of Technology in 2006, Tam went to the US and received a doctorate in computer science from Rutgers in 2013. 

After that, he became the founder and director of the Mobile & Networked Systems Laboratory at Univ of Colorado Denver, where he and his co-workers conducted research to build smart systems to improve ways to take care of human health, especially children.

The desire to bring real products to serve humans is why Tam focuses in the medical field.

He designs and applies advanced technique of wireless systems into biosensor apps, such as smart devices to measure the breathing rate, monitor brain wave signals, record muscle movement and monitor the quality of sleep.

The method causes less inconvenience to users, while it is much less costly than other devices available in the market.

During three years working at University of Colorado at Denver, Prof Vu Ngoc Tam received nine US patents and many prizes at technology conferences.

Tam’s research works have been published on many prestigious scientific journals and technology seminars such as ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiSys, ACM SENSYS, ACM CCS, IEEE Infocom, ACM UbiComp and Mobile Computing (TMC).

LIBS, the brain wave measuring device, the latest product created by the young PhD in cooperation with Nguyen Tran Lan Anh, a postgraduate, has won the prize at ACM SENSYS, the prestigious sensor conference held in November 2016 at Stanford University.

In October 2016, WiSpiro, the autonomous system that monitors a person’s breathing volume, created by Tam and postgraduate Nguyen Van Phuc won the prize at ACM MobiCom – S3.

The idea about WiSpiro occurred to Tam three years ago when he was working at the university laboratory specializing in studies about sleep. He saw patients with sleep disorders being monitored with cumbersome equipment attached to their face and chest.

“Why does such expensive equipment take too much room and cause inconvenience to users?” he thought. The equipment costs $40,000-50,000.

Tam created a device for breathing volume monitoring from afar using wireless signals.

WiSpiro immediately caught the attention from the science community and Tam received $575,000 worth of financial support from the US government.

Professor Vu Ngoc Tam is the major researcher on three projects supported by the US National Science Fund (NSF), totaling $1.7 million.

Thanks to excellent research, Tam received a Google Faculty Research Award 2014 from Google and received financial support of $55,000 from the technology firm for the work on security ring. 

He also received four prizes for his articles from the world’s leading conferences, including SENSYS 2016, MobiCom S3 2016, MobiCom 2012 and MobiCom 2011.

His computer program predicting the patient’s recovery process received 2015 Creative Research Fellowship from Colorado-Denver.

Thanh Lich