RAPID: Collaborative Research: Data Analytics for Mechano-acoustic and Physiological Monitoring of COVID19 Symptoms

新冠肺炎病原体的新颖性、传播方式的多样性、缺乏普遍检测能力、缺乏疫苗、缺乏有效治疗所需的医疗用品和医院人员，是应对这一大流行的关键挑战。这一快速项目解决了流行病特别是新冠肺炎疫情的一个关键问题--任何卫生保健系统的能力有限--医院和卫生保健提供者难以向需要治疗的患者提供有针对性的护理。该项目建议通过开发低成本的传感和现场数据分析平台技术来应对这一挑战，以实现对个人的个性化、分布式和持续的健康监测，从而提供住院期间的早期疾病检测能力，最大限度地减少不必要的住院次数，并作为一个早期预警系统，使预防措施能够及早采取，特别是对于老年人和最容易感染新冠肺炎的高危个人。该项目将能够：(1)在临床环境中监测疾病在医护人员中传播的早期迹象；(2)跟踪家庭和医院中受感染个人的疾病进展情况，以便有效地提供资源，并捕捉影响的基本方面；(3)准确和准确地衡量目前正在评估的大量各种疗法的有效性和操作时间表。这些感官处理平台的低成本和分布式性质将确保感染和屈服于新冠肺炎的高危人群能够获得所需的医疗保健。总体而言，这项研究将能够以普遍的方式快速准确地诊断和跟踪新冠肺炎感染--建立在目前部署在芝加哥医疗综合体中的独特的无线设备平台上--从而为限制当前和未来的流行病对社会的影响做出重大贡献。这项拟议的技术将使用皮肤安装的软电子计算平台(“贴片”)从接受新冠肺炎测试的个人那里获取潜在生理过程(如听诊器测量的过程)的机械声学特征和核心-身体运动的精确运动学特征，使用数字信号处理和机器学习的混合开发低复杂性的数据分析算法以高精度检测感染的存在，并将这些算法部署在此类资源受限的计算平台上进行快速诊断。拟议的工作将增加目前部署在当地医院的贴片，配备脉搏血氧仪(SpO2)传感器。拟议的工作包括：1)使用当前部署补丁程序获取的患者数据开发用于新冠肺炎特定分析的低复杂性定点ML算法；2)开发将此类算法节能地嵌入到启用SpO2的补丁程序和相关硬件上的方法；3)在现场与患者一起部署基于ML的新冠肺炎特定数据分析。这项研究汇集了灵活的无线电子、机械-声学传感设备、高能效推理体系结构和低复杂性数据分析方面的创新，以实现对各种疾病和感染(包括新冠肺炎)的快速、早期和持续诊断和监测。这项研究的纵向整合(材料到系统)的性质克服了传统的学科界限。在这个过程中，将在基础层面和新的应用方面产生新的知识。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The novelty of the Covid-19 pathogen, diversity of its transmission modes, lack of universal testing capability, absence of a vaccine, lack of medical supplies and personnel in hospitals needed for effective treatment represent key challenges in confronting the pandemic. This RAPID project addresses a key issue with pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular – the limited capacity of any health-care system – whereby hospitals and health-care providers struggle to provide targeted care to patients needing treatment. This project proposes to address this challenge by developing low-cost sensing and in-situ data analytics platform technologies to enable individualized, distributed and continuous health monitoring of individuals and thereby provide early disease detection capabilities in-residence, minimize the number of unnecessary hospital visits, and act as an early warning system to enable preventive measures to be taken early on especially for high-risk individuals such as seniors and elderly individuals who are most vulnerable to Covid-19. This project will enable: (1) monitoring of early signs of disease spread across health care workers in clinical settings, (2) tracking of the progression of the disease in infected individuals, both in the home and the hospital to allow for efficient provisioning of resources and also to capture basic aspects of the effects, and (3) accurately and precisely measuring the effectiveness and the timescale of operation of the large number of various therapeutics that are currently under evaluation. The low-cost and distributed nature of these sensory processing platforms will ensure that populations at high-risk of contracting and succumbing to Covid-19 will be able to access the health care needed. Overall, this research will enable rapid and accurate diagnosis and tracking of the Covid-19 infection in a pervasive manner – building on unique wireless device platforms that are currently deployed in the Chicago medical complex -- and thereby contribute significantly to limiting the impact the current and future pandemics on society. The proposed technology will acquire mechano-acoustic signatures of the underlying physiological processes (such as those measured by a stethoscope) and precision kinematics of core-body motions using a skin-mounted soft electronics compute platform (“The Patch”) from individuals tested for Covid-19, develop low-complexity data analytic algorithms using a hybrid of digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning (ML) to detect the presence of infection with high accuracy, and deploy these algorithms on such resource-constrained compute platforms for rapid diagnosis. Proposed work will augment the Patch, which is currently deployed at the local hospitals, with pulse oximeter (SpO2) sensors. The proposed work includes: 1) development of low-complexity fixed-point ML algorithms for Covid-19 specific analytics using patient data acquired by the current deployment of the Patch; 2) development of methods for energy-efficient embedding of such algorithms on to the SpO2-enabled Patch and associated hardware; 3) and deployment of the ML-based Covid-19 specific data analytics in the field with patients. This research brings together innovations in flexible wireless electronics, mechano-acoustic sensing devices, energy-efficient inference architectures, and low-complexity data analytics for the purposes of rapid, early and continuous diagnosis and monitoring of various diseases and infections including Covid-19. The vertically-integrated (materials-to-systems) nature of this research overcomes traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this process, new knowledge will be generated both at a fundamental level and in terms of new applications.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.