CSR: Small: Transforming Mobile Devices into Active Sonar Systems for Medical Applications

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The project converts mobile systems including smartphones into active sonar systems by leveraging the speakers and microphones commonly available on existing mobile devices. Using this approach, the system addresses long-standing and increasingly urgent problems in two key healthcare domains: pharmacologically-induced apnea diagnosis and assistive interfaces for patients with muscular disorders. Unlike medical ultrasound devices that operate in the megahertz frequencies, microphones and speakers on smartphones are designed for much lower frequencies. The project answers fundamental questions about the feasibility of using active sonar on smartphones to address medical applications. It will produce algorithms that track breathing signals, required for pharmacologically-induced apnea detection, even in the presence of movements from other parts of the body. Finally, the project will result in algorithms that achieve tracking of the tongue motion from outside the mouth using the reflections from the acoustic signals as processed by the smartphone. Medical conditions that result in fatal apnea events have increasingly become a public health emergency. The project, if successful, would achieve a mobile system that can detect these events, thus providing an opportunity to potentially saving numerous lives. The second part of the project will create a tongue-based interaction toolkit that would help hundreds of thousands of patients with muscular disabilities to interact with existing mobile devices, using only a software app - a capability that currently does not exist. The resulting prototypes will be showcased at DawgBytes Summer Camps and University of Washington Women's Initiative. The results of the project will be added to the project webpage. The data will be stripped of any private information and will be added to the project webpage. The resulting breathing signals and the benchmarks data from our deployments will be added to the webpage for independent analysis. The project webpage is at the following link: http://apnea.cs.washington.edu This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.