The objective of this project will be the creation of smart devices that promote awareness and understanding of personal activity spaces and how they affect health. Through the creation of wearable devices that integrate data-logging global positioning system receivers with personal and environmental sensors, our aim is to create integrated devices that can provide a wealth of individual-level data that can address major public health problems, such as the relationship between physical exercise and obesity, social interaction and the spread of infectious diseases, assessment of small-scale variations in exposures to airborne pollution, and environmental injustices (i.e., higher exposures in underprivileged groups). These devices allow for the spatiotemporal mapping of individual activity spaces and the identification of health risks associated with these spaces. Such information has the potential to improve Public Health by altering environmental policies, community understanding and perceptions, and individual behaviors.

The expected main achievements of PHAST will be to develop linkages between Public Health and Engineering faculty, students, and industry through the co-development of a core set of geo-positioning prototype sensor devices, field testing of these devices, and joint exploration of how these, and other wearable devices may be applied to major public health problems. This collaboration may be leveraged in the future on new grants that develop additional sensors for health applications.

2009 Update:

This CITRIS grant established the Public Health Assisting Smart Technologies (PHAST) Project to apply pervasive computing and sensor technology to personal monitoring that can lead to improved understanding of exposure to hazardous environments and spatial context associated with environmentally-mediated diseases, such as many infectious diseases, obesity, and asthma. The project successfully developed collaborations between health researchers and engineers to develop a flexible wearable sensor system based on mote-technology and an open source software framework that facilitates the monitoring of a personal health variables, such as geographic location, physical activity, exposure to air pollution, breathing and heart rate, and interactions between individuals. We successfully demonstrated the technology for (1) in China for monitoring spatial interaction patterns of villagers at risk of infectious disease, (2) on the Berkeley campus for visualizing spatial patterns of air pollution exposure, (3) at Oakland Children's Hospital for measuring the physical activity patterns of obese children, and (4) in collaboration with Vanderbilt University, monitoring and providing feedback to congestive heart failure patients. The PHAST project has produced an innovative open source algorithm for estimating energy expenditure that has served as the foundation for several new proposals to the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. While the pilot funding has been instrumental in initiating collaboration between health researchers and engineers, and developing and demonstrating prototype wearable devices, there are remaining challenges related to thoroughly validating and refine the devices such that they may be deployed in large scale health studies. We are now searching for funding to continue these initial studies.