UMBC researchers designed the Cybersecurity for Manufacturing Operational Technology (CyMOT) program to help manufacturing professionals grow their cybersecurity skills, protecting the sector from cyber threats and increasing their career opportunities. Now, the program has received significant additional funding to expand its impact.

The CyMOT program—launched in 2020 in collaboration with the Chicago-based MxD (Manufacturing x Digital) and UMBC Training Centers—has been renewed with a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation (OLDCC). The funding will support the implementation of new training curricula around machine learning and cybersecurity. 

“In recent years, there has been a large number of cyber attacks on the manufacturing sector,” says Nilanjan Banerjee, professor of computer science and electrical engineering and the grant’s principal investigator. To address this rising concern, Banerjee explains, CyMOT aims to “make sure that people that are in the manufacturing business can get trained and upskilled in cybersecurity concepts around manufacturing.”

Expanding the curriculum

The first initiative of the multi-phased project included developing a cybersecurity curriculum tailored for people who already worked in the manufacturing industry, building on their existing expertise. It provided training for a manufacturing cyber systems operator role and offered content through an online training platform. 

The first cohort included 25 manufacturing professionals. In summer 2022, the program expanded when community college students in Chicago were invited to participate in a modified version of the course.

With this recent 12-month contract renewal, the next phase of the project will include courses for two more senior roles: a manufacturing artificial intelligence/machine learning engineer and an advanced manufacturing cybersecurity operator. This phase is slated to begin in February 2023. The additional funding will cover the cost for up to 150 new students interested in the programs. 

Creating an operational technology cyber range at UMBC

As this program continues to grow, Banerjee also has a related objective in mind: building an operational technology (OT) cyber range at UMBC focused on cybersecurity in manufacturing. 

“We will have equipment on campus with software to run exercises for small and medium manufacturing businesses in Maryland and students at UMBC,” Banerjee explains. “The cyber range will include red team-blue team exercises, as well as exercises to learn about cyber attacks on a company’s infrastructure. We will also conduct exercises around attacks at the interface between information technology networks and operational technology networks.”

With the cyber range, manufacturing professionals in the state can learn how to detect and mitigate cyberattacks through hands-on exercises using similar equipment found in a manufacturing OT environment.

The cyber range will be a unique resource for training and research in Maryland. It will also tie to several cybersecurity programs offered by UMBC and an apprenticeship program offered through the Maryland Extension Partnership (MEP). With emphasis on digitizing the manufacturing sector in Maryland at a time of continually increasing interconnectivity and automation (known as Industry 4.0), the cyber range will act as the testbed to train manufacturers across the state.  

Workforce development in Maryland

Donna Ruginski, UMBC’s executive director of cybersecurity initiatives and a co-PI of CyMOT, shares that the project has the potential to expand Maryland’s workforce development in a significant way, whether through curriculum development and delivery or an OT cyber range. 

“As the manufacturing industry implements digital transformation to Industry 4.0, cybersecurity training resources have become more important,” says Ruginski. “There is a shortage of people who can do cyber-related jobs. CyMOT is an avenue to up-skill and train a talent base positioned to fill those gaps in the workforce.” 

After getting its start with implementation in Chicago, CyMOT has attracted the attention of Maryland state agencies, such as the Department of Commerce, and has been recognized by leaders in manufacturing, such as the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland (RMI). UMBC was named as one of RMI’s Champions of Maryland Manufacturing at its 2022 Maryland Manufacturing Celebration, held earlier this fall. 

On behalf of UMBC, Banerjee and Ruginski accepted an executive citation in recognition of CyMOT’s contributions to Maryland’s manufacturing industry.

“It is a great honor to be awarded an RMI Champions award,” says Banerjee. “The work around cybersecurity training and research performed at UMBC is having a true impact on growing the workforce and digitizing the regional manufacturing ecosystem, and the award is testimony to that fact.”

Opioid-related deaths have risen sharply in the U.S. in recent years. In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis to be a public health emergency—one disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities—and the crisis has worsened since then.

In response to the rising epidemic, UMBC researchers have partnered with the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) to develop a device that could help prevent opioid overdose deaths. The device is a non-invasive CO2 monitor designed to more effectively detect and reverse an opioid overdose in real time. It was recently awarded a one-year grant of more than $500,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

“Opioid-related death is a serious problem for the country. We hope this new device will help to directly address this issue,” said the study’s co-PI Xudong Ge, research professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering (CBEE). 

Meeting an urgent need

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics reported that during a 12-month period ending in April 2021, more than 100,000 drug overdoses were recorded in the U.S., with nearly 76,000 deaths attributed to opioid usage. In a separate 2022 report, the CDC noted the severity of this impact among underserved communities of color. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, overdose death rates increased 44 percent amongst Black populations and 39 percent in American Indian and Alaska Native populations.

“If you look at the statistics, the people who are dying from opioid overdoses largely come from underserved minority communities. They are the ones that need the most help,” said Thelma Wright, associate professor of pain medicine at UMSOM, who developed the idea for the study. 

As a pain medicine physician, she said she was aware of how medically-prescribed opioids have contributed to the rise in overdose death rates. In 2016, Wright began to conceptualize a way to non-invasively monitor if a patient is about to die from an opioid overdose and ways to immediately administer naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can quickly reverse an overdose.  

Despite administering naloxone to people experiencing opioid overdose, to reverse their respiratory depression, many overdose cases are fatal because the naloxone was not administered in time, Wright shared. 

“When someone is dying from an overdose, they cannot get the antidote from their medicine cabinet to administer it to themselves. I asked around if there was a sensitive monitor that could immediately detect an opioid overdose, and there was nothing,” said Wright. “I needed to find some sort of parameter that would signal respiratory depression due to an overdose, and the most accurate parameter happened to be a carbon dioxide (CO2) monitor.”

Evolving CO2 monitoring research

Opioids stimulate receptors in the brain and can cause a decrease in pain perception. When brain receptors are overstimulated, the brainstem can then become desensitized to rises in CO2 levels. As a result, the opioid user could experience respiratory depression, loss of protective airway reflexes, and respiratory arrest. 

Ge, who serves as the assistant director of UMBC’s Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST), has spent more than a decade researching and developing non-invasive CO2 sensor systems. During the pandemic, Ge, along with Govind Rao, a professor of CBEE and the director of CAST, co-authored a study published in Medical Engineering & Physics analyzing the effects of face coverings on transdermal CO2 levels. The study demonstrated the potential effectiveness of monitoring CO2 levels through the use of wearable transdermal CO2 sensors. 

“The original CO2 monitoring device is large, about the size of a suitcase,” said Ge. Wright approached Ge and Rao to develop a miniaturized, wearable version that could address some of the shortcomings of other devices available today.

Ge explains that traditional non-invasive CO2 monitors that are used on the skin heat up to about 42 degrees Celsius, or more than 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the high heat, they can leave burns on skin and cannot be worn for an extended amount of time. The monitors tend to work at a slower speed and can come with a price tag averaging about $25,000. 

Along with miniaturizing the device, Ge aims to create a monitor that is safer and more comfortable, delivers data more efficiently, and is more affordable for the average consumer.

Developing the device

When a patient wears the CO2 device and experiences respiratory depression due to an overdose, the device will trigger an alarm that will automatically inject naloxone. In order to validate the study’s proof of principle, the initial phases of the study will start with developing and testing CO2 sensor prototypes. The test results will then be compared to data from a similar FDA-approved device that they are hoping to improve on. 

“We will run side by side tests to see how accurate our device is and then do challenge studies, like holding your breath, breathing into a bag, or exercising to get the subjects’ CO2 levels up in the body to see if we are able to detect it,” says Rao. “We will incorporate some elements of machine learning to detect the signal accurately, to make sure that there are no false positives or false negatives.”

The investigators have hired UMBC postdoctoral researcher Preety Ahuja to work on the prototyping. If the study is granted additional funding, Wright and her team of researchers will test the sensor on animal subjects to validate whether the wearable transdermal CO2 alarm will be effective. The researchers also intend to develop a mobile app to gather and share the data provided by the monitor. 

Rao looks forward to collaborating closely with Wright through this UMBC-UMSOM partnership, noting the significance of her work with underserved populations in Baltimore. He shares, “Dr. Wright is very keen and passionate about finding solutions and our UMBC team is very excited to be working with her.”