I-Corps: Tracking Cognitive Functions with Ear-worn Bio-sensing Device

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The broader impact of this I-Corps project will be to enable bio-sensing earphones for personalized healthcare. It can benefit a wide range of systems and applications that require continuous and long-term personal monitoring, such as user behavior analysis, seizure suppression, sleep improvement, and personalized education. Currently, there are 3 billion people without access to healthcare who could potentially benefit from the device. Mobile healthcare is rapidly growing, emerging industry in need of a socially acceptable, platform technology to enable healthcare applications outside the hospital. This project will directly support national level initiatives on improving healthcare practices and enhancing future workforce capability. To make the broadest impact possible, the project will initially focus on individual customers, to improve lives in ways that were technologically impossible before. The potential innovation enables a mobile healthcare platform for everyday use with high accuracy, low cost, and high comfort to users.This I-Corps project includes several innovations to enable previously impossible mobile physiological sensing. This ear-worn device enables everyday users to access the medically valuable physiological data from the human head in a comfortable, small, and wearable form factor placed in or around the ears. The project's algorithms, hardware, and software can infer the wearer's mental, physiological, and physical states from the ears. The resulting innovation enables immediate access to vital health information such as sleep deprivation, attention, and even seizure onset without using obtrusive, expensive hospital equipment. The team will evaluate the platform through customer discovery and other commercialization focused evaluations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.