Wearable lung sounds, fluid, and body temperature monitoring for patients with COVID-19

2019冠状病毒病大流行对世界各地的社会、社区和医疗保健系统产生了巨大影响，并有可能在未来几个月和几年继续对社会构成挑战。截至撰写本提案时，已有100多万美国人被诊断出患有COVID-19, 6万多美国人丧生。本研究的最终目标是创建一种可穿戴式生理传感解决方案，用于COVID-19患者管理，包括基于同一设备捕获的肺音、肺液、体温和惯性测量对患者进行诊断、分诊和监测。核心创新在于为此目的提出的硬件和算法，建立在该团队之前在可穿戴生物声学传感和生物阻抗光谱等其他领域的工作基础上。本研究提出以下两个具体目标：(1)设计、实现并验证可穿戴式肺音、肺液、体温和惯性测量传感系统；(2)对该系统进行测试和评估，以纵向评估COVID-19住院患者和COVID-19调查人员的疗效和潜在信息。该项目的成功完成将产生一个经过验证的原型，用于感知COVID-19患者心肺健康的多个参数，即将实现技术商业化并通过监管途径。这将为医护人员提供一种急需的针对这种新型冠状病毒的患者管理技术，并最终成为远程监控患者的一种手段，以确保尽早发现任何健康状况的恶化。

The COVID-19 pandemic has tremendously impacted society, communities, and the healthcare system across the world, and threatens to continue to challenge society for the coming months and years. More than 1 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 60,000 Americans have lost their lives as of the writing of this proposal. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a wearable physiological sensing solution for COVID-19 patient management, including diagnosis, triage, and monitoring of patients based on lung sounds, lung fluid, body temperature, and inertial measures captured with the same device. The central innovation lies in the hardware and algorithms that have been proposed for this purpose, building upon the team’s prior work in other areas of wearable bio-acoustic sensing and bioimpedance spectroscopy. The following two specific aims are proposed for the research: (1) to design, implement, and validate a wearable sensing system for lung sounds, lung fluid, body temperature, and inertial measurements; and (2) to test and evaluate this system to assess efficacy and potential information derived in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and persons under investigation for COVID-19 longitudinally. Successful completion of this project would result in a validated prototype for sensing multiple parameters of cardiopulmonary health in patients with COVID-19, with imminent feasibility to transition the technology to commercialization and through regulatory pathways. This would provide a much-needed patient management technology for this novel coronavirus to healthcare practitioners and ultimately a means to monitor patients remotely to ensure that any deterioration in health is detected as early as possible.