Dr. Kapil Dandekar, Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the primary investigator on the inter-disciplinary project "SCH: INT: Smart and Connected Health for Newborn Ventilation." The project was recently selected for funding by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The project's co-investigators include Dr. Anup Das from ECE, Dr. Vineet Bhandari and Dr. Endla Anday from Drexel's College of Medicine, Dr. Genevieve Dion from the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, Dr. Kelly Joyce from the College of Arts and Sciences, and Dr. William Mongan from the College of Computing and Informatics.
The project is funded at an anticipated $1.04 million over four years.
The goal of the research is "to develop a smart and connected health solution to unobtrustively and non-invasively monitor newborns," write the investigators in the project's abstract. "A key outcome of this proposal," they continue, "is the design of a control loop to intelligently synchronize newborn breathing with an external ventilator to provide invasive as well as non-invasive ventilation. While flow sensors in the endotracheal tube (EET) can provide effective synchronization, they significant increase the size, form-factor, and hence, the cost of the EET. Instead this proposal will use our unique fabric-based biomedical sensors, which will enhance non-invasive ventilatory assistance and decrease lung injury. Building upon our past work on designing biomedical functional fabrics, we will leverage human factors analysis to incorporate stakeholder (e.g., patients' parents, nurses, doctors) feedback early in the design process to reduce the barriers to technology adoption for our non-invasive sensors to provide synchronization, both in the invasive and non-invasive modes of assisted ventilation, to the neonate."
The ECE Department extends our congratulations to the investigators on this great opportunity!