This award provides funding for a collaborative project between Dartmouth College, Rice University and the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. Soon, technology for mobile health (mHealth) will enable individuals to wear one or more sensing devices to better monitor their health conditions, or enable rural health workers to make periodic visits to villages that may not have access to routine healthcare services. The investigators in this project are developing the scientific foundations for a modular kit of mHealth components -- portable, inexpensive, and usable by patients or healthcare workers with limited training -- that can be assembled into a variety of combinations for different circumstances or healthcare purposes. Scientifically, they are addressing two fundamental questions: (1) how to construct secure, self-aware sensors that can attest to the provenance of the sensor data and its context; (2) how to design a system for computational triage that can provide real-time on-site feedback to the patient, avoiding the need for every patient visit, every data point, to be examined by skilled health professionals. The intellectual merit of this project is in (1) developing a new breed of portable medical sensors with the intelligence to identify and securely attest to the origin and quality of the data, and (2) developing computational triage algorithms that guide individual subjects to a medical facility when tests reveal a high chance of potential health problems. The research should result in broader impacts including (1) technology that could radically improve preventive health, (2) students trained on healthcare technologies in a wider global context, and (3) technologies that will have applications beyond healthcare, such as in critical infrastructure monitoring. This project is part of the Pervasive Communications and Computing Collaboration (PC3) initiative.
Intellectual Merit: The major goal for the project was to enable portable, inexpensive, mHealth diagnostics that can be operated by patients or healthcare workers with limited training. The fundamental challenge is as follows. Often the medical sensors are developed for use in ideal conditions but when operated by non-experts, the resulting tests can lead to unreliable and error-prone data. Thus our research objectives were to enable medical diagnostics, especially advanced diagnostics, in non-ideal conditions performed by non-experts. Towards that end, we developed mobileSpiro, a fully functional portable battery-operated spirometer to conduct lung function testing which is a combination of robust hardware coupled with an app operating on Android tablet or smartphone; see picture. Rice mobileSpiro has been fully calibrated to meet both ATS and ISO standards for spirometry, and thus can be field-tested in its current form. The key innovations are novel software algorithms which detect error in spirometry maneuver in real-time and inform the patient to conduct the maneuver again by avoiding specific errors (coughing, hesitation, short maneuver). Our software can detect 94% of the errors, much like an average pulmonary function testing technician in respiratory labs. Broader Impacts: The project led to two measurable broader impacts. First, according to World Health Organization reports, many of the respiratory illnesses go undiagnosed or underdiagnosed due to lack of proper diagnostic tools in under-resourced communities. To address that challenge, the Rice team is collaborating with Baylor College of Medicine and MediCiti Institute of Medical Sciences; see picture. The new team of three organizations are working towards a large-scale trial of mobileSpiro in rural communities in Aliabad Village, close to Hyderabad India. The validation trials will be first conducted in Houston texas, and then two phases of trials will be conducted in MIMS and Aliabad. Second, Rice researchers have spun off a startup, Cognita Labs, that is working to commercialize mobileSpiro. The Rice team participated in NSF i-Corps program during the Summer of 2014 to establish a business model for mobileSpiro inspired commercial device. Based on the outcomes of the i-Corps program, the team has already applied to NIH SBIR program to fund commercialization of a new portable spirometer, that will be developed by Cognita Labs.
