Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for the Next-generation Enterprise to Engineer Diagnostics at Low-cost for the home-Ecosystem (NEEDLE)

正如COVID-19期间医疗服务中断所表明的那样，卫生保健供应链是脆弱的。虽然数字卫生方面的进步有可能改善卫生服务供应链，但可供在家患者使用的最先进的健康传感器技术的范围很小，而且准确性严重有限。此外，这些传感器仅限于一组常见的测量，如体温、血压、体重、血氧饱和度和血糖监测。因此，现有的技术无法为医疗从业者提供充分的远程患者诊断信息，这些信息与传统的面对面医疗访问获得的数据相当接近。这项拨款旨在为工程研究中心（ERC）制定远景规划，该中心将生产下一代家庭健康诊断技术，从而有效地将医学实验室和医生带入家庭。因此，该项目将启动专门的研讨会，以探索NSF ERC为下一代企业设计低成本家庭生态系统诊断（NEEDLE）的可行性。讲习班的成果将通过出版物和会议发言广泛传播。最后，一名博士后研究员的参与帮助协调活动，以及在三所大学合作的学生团队的种子竞赛，为培养下一代技术开发创新者提供了机会。通过将每个家庭直接连接到数字健康生态系统，针头ERC可以催生技术的发展，从而显著加强医疗服务供应链。该ERC将专注于创建一个诊断工具包，为每个家庭提供在医疗机构中发现的医疗等效体检（例如检查、触诊和叩诊）和标准实验室测试（例如全血细胞计数、基本代谢和病毒载量），以及支持人工智能的数据基础设施，用于个性化健康监测。该问题的高度集成和复杂性需要社区利益相关者以及生物材料传感器、非侵入性生物成像、微/纳米制造、光谱学、数据科学、微/纳米电子学和高级信号处理等领域的专家的融合。拟议的规划赠款将举办讲习班，旨在将这些社区聚集在一起，编写一份需求评估报告和一份关于发展家庭诊断所需的科学和技术突破的10年路线图。这些活动将有助于制定部署策略，以减轻发达技术可及性的任何障碍，包括成本和一般可用性，特别是对于那些经历与年龄相关的潜在认知能力下降的人群、没有“数字原生代”技术经验的人群，或者那些生活在Wi-Fi可及性不足地区的人群。该项目由工程理事会的ERC项目/EEC部门和促进竞争研究的既定计划（EPSCoR）共同资助。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 health-care supply chain is fragile, as illustrated by the breakdowns in care delivery experienced during COVID-19. While advances in digital health have the potential to improve the health-services supply chain, the range of available state-of-the-art health-sensor technologies for at-home patient use is minimal and severely limited in accuracy. Moreover, these sensors are limited to a common group of measures such as body temperature, blood pressure, weight, oxygen saturation, and glucose monitoring. Therefore, the technology does not exist to provide health practitioners with sufficient, remote patient diagnostic information that reasonably approximates data obtained from traditional in-person medical visits. This grant seeks to map out a vision for an Engineering Research Center (ERC) that will produce the next generation of home-health diagnostic technologies to effectively bring the medical lab and physician to the home. Thus, the project will launch specialized workshops to explore the feasibility of an NSF ERC for the Next-generation Enterprise to Engineer Diagnostics at Low-cost for the home-Ecosystem (NEEDLE). Outcomes from the workshops will be broadly disseminated via publications and conference presentations. Finally, the involvement of a postdoctoral researcher to help coordinate activities, as well as a seed competition for student teams collaborating across three universities, provides an opportunity to train the next generation of innovators in technology development. A NEEDLE ERC could spawn the development of technologies that could significantly strengthen the health-services supply chain by directly connecting every home to the digital-health ecosystem. This ERC will focus on creating a diagnostic toolkit that will provide every home with the medical equivalent of the physical exam (e.g., inspection, palpation, and percussion) and standard lab tests (e.g., complete blood count, basic metabolic, and viral load) found at a medical facility, along with an AI-enabled data infrastructure for personalized health monitoring. The highly integrated and complex nature of the problem requires a convergence of community stakeholders, and experts in areas such as biomaterial sensors, non-invasive biological imaging, micro/nanofabrication, spectroscopy, data science, micro/nanoelectronics, and advanced signal processing. The proposed planning-grant will introduce workshops aimed at bringing these communities together to produce a needs-assessment report and a 10-year roadmap of the scientific and technological breakthroughs needed to develop home diagnostics. These activities will enable the formulation of a deployment strategy to mitigate any barriers to accessibility for developed technologies, including cost and general usability, especially for populations experiencing potential age-related cognitive decline, populations without “digital native” experience with technology, or those living in zones with inadequate Wi-Fi accessibility.This project is jointly funded by the ERC Program/EEC Division of the Engineering Directorate and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.