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

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.