STTR Phase I: Development of a Wearable Long-term Monitor for Cardiac Arrhythmia

这项小型企业技术转让（STTR）第一阶段项目的广泛影响/商业潜力是深远的。一项初步的市场研究表明，发达国家的1.5%到2.5% ？据世界卫生组织报告，全球约0.5%的人口患有心律失常。对于心房颤动，仅在美国，到2015年，这种疾病将折磨约770万人，每年折磨约46万新患者，预计到2050年患者负荷将增长到1210万（CDC）。心房颤动及其并发症（中风、充血性心力衰竭、癫痫发作、死亡等）为美国增加了260亿美元的收入。美国每年的医疗费用，每年导致近8万人死亡。房颤患者的全球负荷是惊人的3350万，每年新诊断400万，相当于全球治疗该疾病及其并发症的约1000亿美元。这些患者中有整整25%患有阵发性心房颤动，因此需要对他们的负担进行诊断，以便指导和监测治疗。在减少经济影响的同时，创造一种易于佩戴的长期设备，指导个体治疗，从而大大改善心律失常患者的生活质量和医疗结果，也将对人类健康产生巨大的好处。提出的项目具有以下智力优势：将开发详细的模型和验证方法，以了解超宽带（UWB）雷达信号如何与人体组织相互作用；将开发一个原型超宽带雷达传感器来验证建模工作；将对超宽带雷达传感器进行优化，以改善雷达运动检测系统的操作特性，从而实现鲁棒心脏运动监测；该项目有望开发一种基于雷达、无创、低功耗、长时间可穿戴的心脏运动监测仪，可以灵敏地诊断和检测间歇性心律失常，包括阵发性心房颤动和心房扑动，以及许多其他心律失常的心脏运动；这将为长时间（2周至1年）监测患者提供另一种非常理想的方法，这是现有的电或心电图监测系统（如霍尔特或其他外部安装的心脏事件监测仪）无法实现的。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project is far-reaching. A preliminary market study indicates that 1.5% to 2.5% of the developed world?s population suffers from heart arrhythmias while the WHO reports ~0.5% of the global population. For Atrial fibrillation, in the USA alone this disease will afflict ~7.7 million people by 2015, afflicts ~460,000 new patients every year and the patient load is projected to grow to 12.1 million by 2050 (CDC). Atrial fibrillation and its complications (stroke, congestive heart failure, seizures, death, etc.) add $26B to the nation?s annual healthcare costs and kill nearly 80,000 people/yr. The global load of Atrial fibrillation patients is a staggering 33.5 million with 4 million newly diagnosed every year which equates to ~$100B to treat the disease and its complications worldwide. Fully 25% of these patients have paroxysmal Atrial fibrillation so their % burden needs to be diagnosed in order to guide and monitor therapy. Together with reducing the economic impacts, it would also be enormous benefit to human health to create an easy-to-wear for long-periods device that guides individual therapy, thus substantially improving the quality of life and medical outcomes for arrhythmia patients. The proposed project has the following intellectual merits: A detailed model and validation methods will be developed to understand how ultra wideband (UWB) radar signals interact with human tissue; a prototype UWB radar sensor will be developed to validate the modeling effort; an optimization of the UWB radar sensor will be carried out to improve the operational characteristics of the radar motion detection system in order to enable robust heart motion monitoring; This project is expected to enable the development of a radar-based, non-invasive, low-power, long-duration-wearable, heart motion monitor that can sensitively diagnose and detect intermittent arrhythmias including paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and atrial flutter as well as numerous other arrhythmogenic heart motions; This will provide an alternative and much desired means to monitor patients for extended periods of time ( 2 weeks and up to 1 year), something not feasible or practical to accomplish with existing electrical or EKG monitoring systems like the Holter or other externally-mounted cardiac event monitors.