SBIR Phase II:Single wearable patch for cost-effective, reliable, and accurate home sleep apnea testing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to help patients with cardiorespiratory conditions, including sleep apnea and cardiac arrhythmia. The project will develop a wearable sensor platform to simultaneously diagnose and monitor conditions. Multiple physiological measurements are collected by a comfortable, wireless sensor patch, resulting in a convenient remote monitoring clinical framework. Interfacing sensor data with an efficient cloud-based provider portal and automated algorithms will enable rapid screening of the 24 million undiagnosed sleep apnea patients in the United States. The proposed innovation will also provide insight into the practical clinical benefits and efficiencies to be gained by bundling multiple comorbid or otherwise related diagnostic pathways into a single workflow, such as reducing time to treatment for comorbid atrial fibrillation. This remote monitoring bundle concept represents the only all-in-one device capable of servicing multiple highly pervasive health challenges in a method unobtrusive and user-friendly for both the patient and the provider - particularly for telemedicine applications made more urgent by the global pandemic.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a simple, accurate, cloud-connected wearable patch and collect clinical comparison data to develop automated, low-power algorithms to simultaneously detect sleep-disordered breathing, sleep stages, and cardiac arrhythmias. The project integrates materials science, mechanical engineering, and signal processing approaches to detect critical physiological signals from the torso, including oxygen saturation and several hemodynamic metrics. The project will also conduct studies that offer early insights into the clinical benefits of bundled workflows across cardiac and sleep medicine specialties.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.