A wristwatch, a phone and the cloud will revolutionize how we monitor and treat chronic health conditions says one University of Rhode Island engineering researcher.
Biomedical engineering Assistant Professor Kunal Mankodiya and his students are developing software that allows a smartphone to monitor a patient’s vital signs. The phone sends the data over the Internet to a server in the cloud for analysis, which feeds the results to a doctor. What previously required a doctor’s visit will now occur 24/7 anywhere thanks to the phone’s built-in sensors that monitor pulse, movement, etc.
Armed with the data, doctors can adjust medication or program a computer to automatically inform the patient to change dosage based on the information sent from the smartwatch. The concept brings the “Internet of Things” – the concept of connecting all things to the Internet – to wearable devices, in this case a watch.
“We’re excited about the potential but it is not easy to design such a wearable system,” Mankodiya says. “It goes into a dynamic environment because the body is always moving. However, as biomedical engineers we understand what physicians need and how the technology can help.”
To solve the problem, Mankodiya and two undergraduate students are creating algorithms for commercially available smartwatches running the Android operating system. By relying on readily available watches, the team keeps costs low and puts its focus on the intelligent algorithms designed for the health field.
At the forefront of the code stands junior biomedical engineering student Cody Goldberg, 20, of Amherst, N.H. He’s never taken a programming class, but with research he coded the software to turn the watch’s monitoring components into a stream of data.
“It’s a lot of fun developing wearable technologies for health care,” he says. “I’m teaching myself stuff I wouldn’t learn otherwise.”
Both Goldberg and his professor jumped into the project for personal reasons. Goldberg’s brother suffers from epilepsy. Goldberg hopes his system will predict a seizure and provide his brother time to react – such as safely stopping a car he’s driving.
Mankodiya started thinking about pairing wearable devices and health monitoring after his father suffered a heart attack in India. Then in Germany, Mankodiya developed wearable health devices to monitor health signs from afar to improve diagnosis and interventions.
“We know people around us who suffer from diseases that require continuous clinical care,” Mankodiya says.
He pursued the concept of a “wearable Internet of Things” during graduate school and as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. He collaborated with the University of Pittsburg Neurological Center to start work on SPARK – the Smart Phone and Watch for Parkinson’s disease patients. The system uses the watch to monitor tremors in patients to measure the disease’s progress and intensity.
When Mankodiya arrived at URI in July 2014, he scaled up the work. Besides Goldberg, he brought in Trevor Bernier, a senior biomedical engineering student from Taunton, Mass.
Bernier, 22, is working on wearable optical sensors that monitor brain activity. By pairing them with related sensors under development by URI biomedical engineering Associate Professor Walt Besio, doctors gain a complete and real-time view of patients’ brain activity. The individual systems have already undergone human testing and now the group hopes to bring them together.
“It’s a very hands-on project allowing me to learn engineering skills demanded in the marketplace,” Bernier says. “I also know people who we can help and who will benefit. That’s greatly rewarding.”