Project Overview
This project will develop R-Mon a real-time mhealth tool for monitoring pulmonary function to diagnose patients with respiratory diseases, who are at home. The tool will identify anomalies in breathe rate and predict pulmonary deterioration to raise alert for immediate actions to the healthcare providers. The uniqueness of the tool is using non-invasive sensors placed under-mattress that are able to communicate data about the respiratory signal. R-Mon will assist with the remote monitoring of patients as an urgent need in the USA and will bring larger impact in delivering medical care for worsening conditions of, for example, COVID-19 patients timely without overwhelming hospital systems that have otherwise limited capacity and resources.
The goal of the research is to perform the needed R&D for real-time monitoring and diagnosis-assistance of patients with respiratory disease, develop and test signal processing techniques, and preliminary evaluation through end users and healthcare professionals.
The significance of the proposed work spans:
- non-invasive extraction of patients’ respiration rates. This research will develop the needed advanced signal processing techniques within (R-Mon) to precisely extract the respiration rate information using under the bed sensors (non-invasive) and without using any other sensor data.
- Real-time monitoring and alerts when lung function anomaly is detected. This research aims to assist either COVID-19 early symptom patients and other respiratory patients (like asthma or apnea) to predict their respiration rate and subsequent monitoring of lung function anomaly to seek medical help. Advanced machine learning techniques will be used to predict patient deterioration over the time and alert consequently. The data will be updated every five or less seconds and communicate directly to the healthcare provider.
- Continuous prediction of potential hospitalizations. This research will utilize data analytics to predict potential hospitalization due to the current conditions of the patients. This will improve the planning of the healthcare services especially in rural areas where the resources are limited.
Publications
[1] Maria Valero, Hossain Shahriar, and Sheikh Ahamed, “R-Mon: An mhealth Tool for Real-time Respiratory Monitoring During Pandemics and Self-Isolation,” Accepted in IEEE Services – IEEE Digital Health as a Service Symposium 2020