I-Corps: A Modern Cost-Effective Device for Sleep Apnea Diagnosis and SIDS Monitor

睡眠呼吸暂停是一种严重的睡眠障碍，会打断人的睡眠。它还可能导致其他医学问题，如心血管疾病、记忆问题、认知障碍和机动车碰撞。目前，为了诊断这种疾病，一个人必须在陌生的环境中像木偶一样睡觉。患者试图在临床环境中复制他们的睡眠模式；其中包括在诊所里睡在医院的病床上，同时通过许多电线连接到机器上，以检测生命体征。这对患者来说是一种不舒服的情况，并且在患者通常的睡眠环境中无法获得测试结果。除了不舒服的经历，长期的生命体征监测是昂贵的。除了睡眠呼吸暂停，这个团队想要解决的另一个问题是婴儿猝死综合症（SIDS），这是导致婴儿死亡的第三大原因。I-Corps团队开发了iMotion雷达技术，该技术提供了一种非接触式且经济高效的方式来监测人体生命体征、识别手势、监测结构健康状况以及感知汽车周围环境。基于现有NSF项目设计的新型传感硬件和算法，该团队将开发一种便携式生物医学雷达传感器，与智能手机接口，以便公众可以轻松使用这种非侵入性技术来监测睡眠。这可能对发展中国家和发达国家基于雷达的健康监测造成巨大的商业影响。

Sleep apnea is a serious sleep disorder that interrupts a person?s breathing during sleep and may contribute to other medical issues such as cardiovascular disease, memory problems, cognitive impairment, and motor vehicle crashes. Currently, to diagnose this disorder an individual must sleep like a marionette in foreign surroundings. Patients attempt to replicate their sleep patterns in a clinical setting; which includes sleeping in a clinic on a hospital bed while attached to machinery by many wires in order to detect vital signs. This is an uncomfortable situation for the patient and the tests results are not gained in the patient's usual sleep environment. In addition to the uncomfortable experience, long-term vital signs monitoring is expensive. In addition to sleep apnea, another problem this team wants to solve is the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) that is the third leading cause of infant mortality.This I-Corps team has developed the iMotion radar technology that provides a non-contact and cost-effective way to monitor human vital signs, identify gestures, monitor structural health, and sense the surroundings of automobiles. Based on novel sensing hardware and algorithms devised in existing NSF project, the team will develop a portable biomedical radar sensor to interface with smart phones, so that the public can easily use this noninvasive technology to monitor sleep. This may result in tremendous commercial impacts on radar-based health monitoring in both developing and developed countries.