To improve people’s long-term health, physicians would like to monitor and measure for the symptoms of serious medical conditions on a daily basis. CITRIS research on remote care addresses the needs of this field, and researchers, including John Canny at UC Berkeley, are working on diagnostic medical devices and their integration with network technologies.
A device developed in the current research program monitors such important health markers as EKG, EMG (back muscle activation), GSR (Galvanic skin response, a stress marker), chest sound, temperature, and movement. The goal of this all-in-one device is specifically to provide longitudinal monitoring for the early warning of more serious conditions and, more generally, to discover the relationships between long-term wellness and health problems. As a Bluetooth device, it is designed to gather data without network connectivity for daily upload to another Bluetooth device. But it can also communicate with specific cell phones from BT for real-time monitoring. This device is quite useful in its current state, and can also be customized to other needs. The BID Lab has complete BT development capabilities (protocol and profile customization).
Next Steps:
The lab is actively seeking partners to explore home and clinical applications of the device. They plan to develop data analysis and visualization tools for these applications. Target users include both health providers and patients themselves (feedback for wellness improvement). We are specifically interested in:
1. Home wellness monitoring
2. Telemedicine in developing regions
3. Crisis reporting and analysis