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/商业潜力是能够使用低成本和非接触式传感方法监测呼吸。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，长期连续监测生理参数对于许多医疗病例（如呼吸暂停）和人机交互应用变得重要。在当前的COVID-19爆发中，该技术的预期好处包括，但不限于，有助于减轻当前（昂贵且有限的）呼吸监测医疗设备的负荷，可部署在开放空间中，并且非常适合急剧增加的COVID-19患者。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，从家中的患者到医生办公室，再到大型医疗机构和行业。这个I-Corps项目涉及所需的技术进步，以实现所提出的低成本和非接触式呼吸传感方法。这种方法与传统的无线呼吸监测方法有很大的不同，有望在这一领域做出重大贡献。鉴于COVID-19在全球范围内的重大影响，提出的技术是及时的。建议的解决方案可在家庭环境（如客厅）和医院等地充分部署，以远程监测呼吸，以筛查和预测COVID-19。所提出的方法可以非常低成本、安全、简单、连续和非突发性地收集呼吸数据，这是对COVID-19和其他慢性呼吸疾病患者进行具有成本效益和积极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，并学习开发引人注目的最小可行产品所需的功能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.