Sleep apnea is a serious sleep disorder that interrupts a person?s breathing during sleep and may contribute to other medical issues such as cardiovascular disease, memory problems, cognitive impairment, and motor vehicle crashes. Currently, to diagnose this disorder an individual must sleep like a marionette in foreign surroundings. Patients attempt to replicate their sleep patterns in a clinical setting; which includes sleeping in a clinic on a hospital bed while attached to machinery by many wires in order to detect vital signs. This is an uncomfortable situation for the patient and the tests results are not gained in the patient's usual sleep environment. In addition to the uncomfortable experience, long-term vital signs monitoring is expensive. In addition to sleep apnea, another problem this team wants to solve is the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that is the third leading cause of infant mortality.
This I-Corps team has developed the iMotion radar technology that provides a non-contact and cost-effective way to monitor human vital signs, identify gestures, monitor structural health, and sense the surroundings of automobiles. Based on novel sensing hardware and algorithms devised in existing NSF project, the team will develop a portable biomedical radar sensor to interface with smart phones, so that the public can easily use this noninvasive technology to monitor sleep. This may result in tremendous commercial impacts on radar-based health monitoring in both developing and developed countries.
