The overall goal of the research and education program is to design component-based patient monitoring technologies for the home. To realize this goal, the principal investigator (PI) will create a new Medical Component Design Laboratory, which will function as a bi-directional conduit to funnel lessons learned between research projects and a set of closely related engineering courses. Light-based sensors have been chosen as the initial vehicle to demonstrate continuous and unobtrusive monitoring of diverse patient data. The two-pronged program will target (1) the design of smart, plug-and-play software and hardware components that function within a distributed medical information infrastructure, and (2) the development of novel, light-based ambulatory sensors that can acquire meaningful physiological data from a patient.
Specific technical objectives include: 1) develop a secure, distributed infrastructure for home-based monitoring systems that utilizes plug-and-play component interoperability standards, 2) build hardware/software components that support smart medical device operation in the home, 3) demonstrate secure interaction between medical devices and electronic patient records, 4) create and clinically validate new algorithms for extracting diagnostic parameters from continuous physiological data acquired with wearable, owner-aware, light-based sensors, and 5) apply research methods for using continuous physiological data to determine and predict state of health.
