In a seminar held January 9, Kofi Odame of the Thayer School of Engineering discussed his research on wearable biomedical devices and how these devices could move the healthcare industry towards adopting a more preventative, proactive model towards treating chronic diseases. Chronic diseases account for seven out of ten deaths in the United States, as well as 85 percent of healthcare dollars spent each year. Odame is focusing on developing devices that would unobtrusively monitor a patient and could potentially minimize the costs of chronic disease.
Around eight percent of the United States population suffers from asthma, and the disease contributes to emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and missed days of school and work. Although an asthma self-management plan can control the symptoms of asthma and prevent attacks, about 75 percent of patients do not follow these plans due to either a lack of education about planning or non-compliance. Odame is developing a wearable asthma-monitoring device that is stuck to a patient’s chest and records their breathing sounds. The breathing can detect if a patient begins wheezing, and will send notifications to their smartphone if they need to make changes to their self-management plan or take medication.
Odame and his team are working to engineer this device to operate off of little power and work for a wide variety of people. The device will be powered by the vibrational energy of the patient’s natural motion and will remain on standby most of the time to conserve power, only waking up if it detects an abnormality. The device will be preloaded with a generic data set that will determine when a patient needs a notification, but it has the capacity to learn about the patient’s own specific sound over time.
Odame is also researching a wearable device to monitor a patient’s cardiac health. Doctors currently monitor their patients through telemonitoring, in which patients take daily readings of their weight, blood pressure, and other parameters and report them over the phone. However, medical professionals only gain a limited amount of data from telemonitoring and the process can be inefficient. Odame is creating a wearable cardiac-monitoring device that injects tiny amounts of current into a patient’s chest and measures the resulting voltages, then reads the resulting impedance to create a virtual map of the heart. This device would be able to collect information more easily and to analyze a wider array of cardiac measurements.
Although these wearable biomedical devices will likely not be commercially available for a few more years, they have large implications for the future of healthcare. Medical professionals could use the large amounts of data, which would be easily and readily available, to detect warning signs more easily and prevent diseases and complications before they worsen rather than reacting to them after they happen.