I-Corps: HealthSmart Technical Development Plan

Oklahoma State University, Stillwater OK

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed I-Corps activity brings together an interdisciplinary team of investigators from engineering, health sciences, and human sciences, to explore pathways to commercialize HealthSmart technology resulting from PIs? ongoing research. The team has been collaborating and pursuing innovative biomedical research activities for over 7 years. Central to the proposed technology is a multi-sensor platform that has evolved from prior NSF TiE CMMI grants for the collection, high-speed wireless transmission, and visualization of multiple heterogeneous physiological signals continuously and synchronously at sampling rates that permit advanced clinical diagnostics and prognostic procedures. The team plans to concurrently pursue two major objectives, (a) development of wearable multi-sensor garments for continuous, synchronous acquisition of hemodynamic signals, and (b) implementation of personalized prediction and prognostic approaches previously developed by the team. The wearable sensor development will be unique in that (a) the wearability (from a patient?s perspective) of the garment among the targeted population would be acquired and assessed based on behavioral studies and customer/user feedback, and (b) multiple microelectromechanical system (MEMS) sensors will be synchronously acquired to track dynamic couplings among physiological processes. The prognostics approach combines key ideas in nonlinear/nonstationary dynamic systems theory with physiological dynamics treated to discern both the short-term health variations (i.e. sleep apnea) and long-term transitions between chronic conditions (i.e. cardiovascular disease). If successful, the proposed project has the potential to attract a breadth of customers who are interested in a HealthSmart garment for at-home or in-hospital cardiovascular (CV) disease monitoring and event prediction. A potential first adopter of this technology would be sleep-apnea diagnostic providers who are interested in the cost savings of at-home diagnostic testing of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) using the proposed HealthSmart garment.