PFI:BIC - A Smart, "Always-on" Health Monitoring System

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) project aims to develop a smart, "always-on" health-monitoring system capable of transforming healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered to proactive, evidence-based, individual-oriented and human-centered. In particular, the project seeks to overcome use problems with mobile-wearable electronics systems that have undermined long-term patient acceptance. Based on the "epidermal" electronic platform developed by the principal investigators, the system will offer "skin-like" properties, to enable intimate, complete, non-invasive integration with people in ways that are impossible with any technology that exists today. This mobile-wearable health-monitoring system will be mechanically "invisible" (i.e., not constraining natural motions or processes of the skin), and will be compatible with daily life activities to ensure long-term sustained engagement of users. It will interact with people through self-detection, self-diagnosis and self-monitoring and will allow clinicians to monitor their patients through wireless communications and data transmission to facilitate self-correcting and self-controlled functions. It will allow the general public to continuously assess personal health and well-being. Continuous monitoring of medical devices may help to prevent serious medical problems through early intervention, particularly in high risk groups of people, thereby providing critical capabilities to the healthcare service system. In pursuing the basic goal of spurring the development and maturation of flexible skin-applied sensors with wireless connection to monitoring and diagnostic systems, the project combines the research expertise of the principal investigators in the core intellectual content of the proposed platforms, which includes nanomaterials, sensors, advanced signal processing, system design, industrial design/human factors and clinical studies. This integration will lead to smart systems that have the potential to transform healthcare. The research entails the following: * Development of "skin-like" temperature, hydration, and electrophysiology sensors, with wireless operation. These systems will exploit unique hardware, formed using extensions of ideas from the principal investigators' recent work on epidermal electronics and sensors. * Studies of interactions between this technology and people, particularly in order to account for human factors relevant to the technology development to ensure lifestyle compatibility. * Development of effective and robust computational modeling and algorithms for statistical signal processing of the sensor data and pattern recognition to create a user-friendly interface for clinicians, patients and even the general public to enable the interpretation of these data and their implications for health and well-being. * Application of the proposed health monitoring system to skin. The continuous capture, storage and transmission of sensor data will be critical to the design of these smart, "always-on" health-monitoring systems. The mechanical "invisibility" of the wearable devices means that they do not interfere with people's daily lives. Accounting for lifestyle compatibility can be illustrated as follows: the less behavior change a device requires in order to simply wear it, the more likely it is that it will drive long-term sustained engagement for users and thus overcome the major limitation of most wearable devices. The primary partners at the inception of this research include the Lead Institution: Northwestern University, McCormick School of Engineering and Feinberg School of Medicine; MC10, Inc (Cambridge, Massachusetts, small business); and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Champaign, Illinois, non-profit, educational).