I-Corps: A Low-cost and Non-contact Respiration Monitoring Method for COVID-19 Screening and Prognosis

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是使用低成本和非接触式传感方法监测呼吸的能力。研究表明，到2022年，实时健康监测设备的市场价值将超过650亿美元。鉴于生活方式相关疾病的高患病率，对许多医疗保健病例(如呼吸暂停和人机交互应用)进行长期持续的生理参数监测变得非常重要。在当前的新冠肺炎疫情中，这项技术的预期好处包括但不限于，有助于减少目前(昂贵和有限的)呼吸监测医疗设备的负载，可以在户外部署，并且非常适合急剧增加的新冠肺炎患者数量。此外，由于呼吸监测是医学中无处不在的元素，这项工作也可能影响整个医疗保健社区，从病人在家里，到医生的办公室，再到大型医疗机构和行业。这个i-Corps项目涉及实现拟议的低成本和非接触式呼吸传感方法所需的技术进步。这种方法与无线呼吸监测的传统方法有很大的不同，并有望在这一领域做出重大贡献。考虑到新冠肺炎的关键全球影响，拟议的技术来得正是时候。建议的解决方案可充分部署在家庭环境(如起居室)和医院等中，以远程监测呼吸，用于新冠肺炎筛查和预后。建议的方法允许以非常低的成本、安全、容易、连续和非侵入性地收集呼吸数据--这是对患有新冠肺炎和其他慢性呼吸道疾病的患者进行具有成本效益和前瞻性的治疗和管理的关键投入。该项目将允许团队通过进行客户发现和访谈来更好地了解未满足的需求，开发可行的商业模式，并了解开发引人注目的最低可行产品所需的功能。该奖项反映了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 broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the ability to monitor respiration using a low-cost and non-contact sensing method. Studies show that real-time health monitoring devices will reach a market value of over $65 billion by 2022. Given the high prevalence of lifestyle-associated disorders, long-term continuous monitoring of physiological parameters becomes important for many healthcare cases such as apnea and for human-computer-interaction applications. The anticipated benefits of the technology in the current COVID-19 outbreak include, but are not limited to, helping to reduce the load of current (expensive and limited) respiration monitoring medical equipment, being deployable in open-spaces and being highly desirable for the drastically increasing numbers of COVID-19 patients. Further, since respiration monitoring is a ubiquitous element of medicine, this work may also impact the entire health care community, from patients in their homes, to doctor’s offices, to large medical institutions and industries. This I-Corps project involves the technological advancement required to enable the proposed low-cost and non-contact respiration sensing method. This method represents a substantial departure from traditional approaches to wireless respiration monitoring and is poised to make significant contributions in this area. The proposed technology is timely given the critical worldwide impact of COVID-19. The proposed solution is adequately deployable in home environments (e.g. living rooms) and hospitals, etc. to remotely monitor respiration for COVID-19 screening and prognosis. The proposed approach allows very low-cost, safe, easy, continuous, and non-obtrusive gathering of respiration data — a critical input for cost-effective and proactive treatment and management of subjects with COVID-19 and other chronic respiratory conditions. This project will allow the team to better understand the unmet needs by conducting customer discoveries and interviews, develop a viable business model, and learn the desired features for developing a compelling minimum viable product.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.