SBIR Phase II: A smart wearable platform for remote respiratory monitoring

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是完成远程电子听诊器平台的开发，以帮助医生和临床医生在家中快速、方便和客观地远程诊断和监测患者的呼吸状态。这项技术不仅将提高患者的护理质量，还将使安全监测的家庭肺部康复得到广泛使用，这将有助于降低与呼吸系统疾病相关的患者发病率和死亡率。该平台还可能收集大量呼吸生理数据，为临床和科学研究提供有价值的数据库，并为使用可能改善呼吸护理的人工智能工具提供一个框架。拟议的项目涉及远程监测患有哮喘和其他肺部疾病(如肺气肿和慢性支气管炎)患者的呼吸状况的挑战。目前的护理标准依赖于训练有素的医疗保健专业人员通过听诊器进行间歇性监测，这增加了在评估和分类肺音时用户之间的显著差异。拟议的项目将推进降噪、设计成本比和面向制造的设计改进，升级后端数据注释和分析系统，以确保系统可伸缩性，并通过大量和相关的患者测试来验证系统的可用性和安全性。最终的智能可穿戴听诊器平台将有助于开发预测算法，提供对肺声信号的长期监测和记录，以改善护理。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 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to complete the development of a remote electronic stethoscope platform to help physicians and clinicians remotely diagnose and monitor a patient’s respiratory status quickly, conveniently, and objectively in an at-home setting. This technology will not only improve the quality of care for patients, but also enable widespread use of safely-monitored, home-based pulmonary rehabilitation, which will contribute to a reduction in patient morbidity and mortality related to respiratory diseases. The platform will also potentially enable a large collection of respiratory physiological data, providing a valuable database for clinical and scientific research as well as a framework for the use of artificial intelligence tools that may improve respiratory care. The proposed project addresses the challenge of telemonitoring the respiratory condition of patients suffering from asthma and other pulmonary diseases, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The current standard of care relies on intermittent monitoring via stethoscope by a trained healthcare professional, which raises significant inter-user variability in the assessment and classification of lung sounds. The proposed project will advance noise reduction, design-to-cost, and design-for-manufacturing improvements, upgrading the backend data annotation and analysis system to ensure system scalability and validating the system usability and safety with substantial and relevant patient testing. The final smart wearable stethoscope platform will enable development of predictive algorithms that offer prolonged monitoring and recording of lung acoustic signals for improved care.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.