Over 1 million hospitalizations for acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) occur every year. Fluid accumulation plays an important role in the genesis of ADHF. Monitoring of fluid status can provide a reliable warning of impending decompensation and an opportunity for preventing hospitalization. There is a need for low cost, non invasive devices that can provide continuous home monitoring of fluid status and other related variables in order to reliably predict impending decompensation in ADHF patients. This project will lead to the development and evaluation of instrumented socks for tracking disease status in patients with chronic forms of heart failure. Thin film flexible sensors on the socks will measure patient weight, ankle circumference, leg tissue elasticity, and blood pressure in the lower legs. These sensor measurements will be used to determine if a patient is at increased risk of acute decompensation. Measurements from the socks will be transmitted wirelessly to a computer in the home and then to a medical provider. The transmitted data will allow health professionals to monitor the patient and make decisions on whether intervention is needed. By enabling continuous patient monitoring at home, better treatment outcomes, fewer hospitalizations and lower costs are expected.
The project will address several technical challenges related to development of sensors in the socks for making reliable fluid status measurements. Innovative sensing principles will be used to enable measurement of weight, ankle circumference, tissue elasticity and lower leg blood pressure in the wearable socks. These measurements will be made without requiring controlled application of forces or displacements and without requiring strict sensor alignment. The ability to measure these variables automatically will remove the need to depend on patients making these measurements regularly which has been shown to be unreliable. The basic functionality of the sensors will first be evaluated using in-vitro tests in the laboratory. Subsequently, tests with a planned selection of volunteers will be used for evaluation of all the measurements from the instrumented socks.
The broader educational activities in the project include recruitment of undergraduate students for summer projects, outreach to high school students and website development for dissemination of research results from the project.
