The project aims to make significant inroads into addressing the national emergency of opioid overdose in the United States using technology. At high doses, opioids can cause rapid cessation of breathing, respiratory failure and death, the physiologic sequence by which people commonly succumb from unintentional opioid overdose. Unlike many life-threatening medical emergencies, however, opioid toxicity is readily reversed with rapid identification and administration of the overdose antidote naloxone. Thus, early detection and rapid intervention can prevent death from opioid overdose. This project will design and deploy solutions (i) that can detect opioid overdose by identifying its respiratory precursors and (ii) that employ an adhesive sensor that can automatically administer naloxone using an auto-injector when dangerous respiratory parameters are detected.
The project will develop foundational technologies that can aid with opioid overdose detection as well as reversal using wearable sensors and mobile devices. Specifically, the proposal, if successful, would make the following technical contributions: 1) design a novel, low-barrier, harm-reduction intervention solution to track breathing in a contactless manner using active sonar in order to detect critical respiratory precursors of opioid overdose, and 2) a new wearable electronic device that is integrated with an auto-injector to deliver naloxone, the overdose antidote, after detecting respiratory parameters consistent with an opioid overdose event. The developed technologies will be tested and deployed with the target population to evaluate their efficacy. The project aims to make significant progress towards developing technology that can address the opioid crisis, using a closed loop system for identification and reversal of opioid overdose events. The team will work with existing industry collaborators to enable tech-transfer and transitioning the developed technologies to industry. The team will also reach out to an aspiring generation of engineering and medical students via K-12 classroom demonstrations as well as broad media releases. A new graduate course on mobile health will be developed that brings together computing and engineering students and students from the health sciences. Finally, smartphone demos will be showcased at DawgBytes Summer Camps and the University of Washington's Women's Initiative that encourage a diverse new generation of students to major in computer science, including women in middle and high schools.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
