I-Corps: Health-Beacons: Flexible Wearable Health and Activity Tracker for Smart Living

Missouri University Of Science And Technology, Rolla MO

Investigators

Abstract

This I-Corps project aims at designing Health-Beacons, which are flexible wearable devices for health and activity tracking. Health-Beacons can provide valuable insights into a user's daily activity and health patterns, thus creating proactive awareness for improved wellness, health performance and quality of living. The benefiting community includes elderly people and their relatives, athletes, doctors and caregivers, among others. Commercial success of Health-Beacons technology will significantly reduce federal expenditures on Medicare, Medicaid and other health/wellness management programs for millions of active people as well as the elderly generation in the United States. The broader impacts of this project also include educational and outreach activities, multi-disciplinary student training, and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship culture among Missouri S&T students. The Health-Beacons system will integrate innovative bendable skin conformable electronics, multi-modal sensing, and machine learning-based sensor data analytics, in collaboration with wireless communications through Bluetooth beacons. The key novelty lies in flexible electronics, intelligent sensor data analytics techniques, and predictive modeling. Through contextual information visualization and interaction, Health-Beacons will be made user-friendly to allow interfacing with a multitude of technologies. The developed system will provide users with a quantified smart living dashboard based on health and activity tracking that can also be displayed on smartphones or smartwatches. Considering that wearable technology for health and wellness management is still in its infancy with early adopters, the Health-Beacons project will create a new body of knowledge in wearable computing, sensor data analytics, and smart healthcare.