SBIR Phase II: Medical Device for Monitoring Respiratory Disease

"This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project is to aid the development of new and better respiratory therapeutics. Over 1 billion individuals suffer from chronic respiratory diseases including conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic cough, and bronchiectasis. COPD is the third deadliest disease in the U.S. and globally. Due to the prevalence and impact of these diseases, $8.6 billion is invested in respiratory clinical trials annually. Currently, in respiratory therapy research and pharma clinical trials, participants’ coughing and wheezing can be a primary or secondary endpoint for measuring drug efficacy. Current solutions for capturing daily fluctuations in cough or respiration are burdensome to use and often produce unreliable data that is less helpful for drawing reproducible conclusions. Additionally, these current solutions add significantly to the cost of respiratory therapy clinical trials. This SBIR Project seeks to address these challenges by producing a wearable device that passively captures accurate, remote data that is essential to unlocking scientific discoveries in respiratory care. This project serves an urgent, unmet need for a reliable, low-effort, low-cost way to measure daily fluctuations in clinical trial participant respiratory signs. The proposed Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II Project employs advanced edge computing to address challenges in objectively monitoring respiratory signs. The proposed activity may make advances in the field of ultra-low power biomedical wearable devices. In particular, new nonlinear analog processing techniques will be developed to make it feasible for long-term monitoring of respiratory signs, including coughing and wheezing. The resulting analog techniques may also be used to implement other types of state-of-the-art medical wearable devices. 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."