Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
June 2025
Accurate identification of sleep stages and disorders is crucial for maintaining health, preventing chronic conditions, and improving diagnosis and treatment. Direct respiratory measurements, as key biomarkers, are missing in traditional wrist- or finger-worn wearables, which thus limit their precision in detection of sleep stages and sleep disorders. By contrast, this work introduces a simple, multimodal, skin-integrated, energy-efficient mechanoacoustic sensor capable of synchronized cardiac and respiratory measurements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContinuous kinematic biofeedback during exercise interventions can lead to improved therapeutic outcomes in hand and wrist rehabilitation. Conventional methods for measuring joint kinematics typically allow only static measurements performed by specially trained therapists. This paper introduces skin-conformal, wearable wireless systems designed to continuously and accurately capture the angles of target joints, specifically in hand and wrist.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCough is an important symptom in children with acute and chronic respiratory disease. Daily cough is common in Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and increased cough is a symptom of pulmonary exacerbation. To date, cough assessment is primarily subjective in clinical practice and research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe human body generates various forms of subtle, broadband acousto-mechanical signals that contain information on cardiorespiratory and gastrointestinal health with potential application for continuous physiological monitoring. Existing device options, ranging from digital stethoscopes to inertial measurement units, offer useful capabilities but have disadvantages such as restricted measurement locations that prevent continuous, longitudinal tracking and that constrain their use to controlled environments. Here we present a wireless, broadband acousto-mechanical sensing network that circumvents these limitations and provides information on processes including slow movements within the body, digestive activity, respiratory sounds and cardiac cycles, all with clinical grade accuracy and independent of artifacts from ambient sounds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCardiovascular health is typically monitored by measuring blood pressure. Here we describe a wireless on-skin system consisting of synchronized sensors for chest electrocardiography and peripheral multispectral photoplethysmography for the continuous monitoring of metrics related to vascular resistance, cardiac output and blood-pressure regulation. We used data from the sensors to train a support-vector-machine model for the classification of haemodynamic states (resulting from exposure to heat or cold, physical exercise, breath holding, performing the Valsalva manoeuvre or from vasopressor administration during post-operative hypotension) that independently affect blood pressure, cardiac output and vascular resistance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSwallowing is a complex neuromuscular activity regulated by the autonomic nervous system. Millions of adults suffer from dysphagia (impaired or difficulty swallowing), including patients with neurological disorders, head and neck cancer, gastrointestinal diseases, and respiratory disorders. Therapeutic treatments for dysphagia include interventions by speech-language pathologists designed to improve the physiology of the swallowing mechanism by training patients to initiate swallows with sufficient frequency and during the expiratory phase of the breathing cycle.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most common noninvasive diagnostic tools that can provide useful information regarding a patient's health status. Deep learning (DL) is an area of intense exploration that leads the way in most attempts to create powerful diagnostic models based on physiological signals.
Objective: This study aimed to provide a systematic review of DL methods applied to ECG data for various clinical applications.
Background: Severity of illness scores-Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation, Simplified Acute Physiology Score, and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment-are current risk stratification and mortality prediction tools used in intensive care units (ICUs) worldwide. Developers of artificial intelligence or machine learning (ML) models predictive of ICU mortality use the severity of illness scores as a reference point when reporting the performance of these computational constructs.
Objective: This study aimed to perform a literature review and meta-analysis of articles that compared binary classification ML models with the severity of illness scores that predict ICU mortality and determine which models have superior performance.
Temporary postoperative cardiac pacing requires devices with percutaneous leads and external wired power and control systems. This hardware introduces risks for infection, limitations on patient mobility, and requirements for surgical extraction procedures. Bioresorbable pacemakers mitigate some of these disadvantages, but they demand pairing with external, wired systems and secondary mechanisms for control.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
October 2021
Early identification of atypical infant movement behaviors consistent with underlying neuromotor pathologies can expedite timely enrollment in therapeutic interventions that exploit inherent neuroplasticity to promote recovery. Traditional neuromotor assessments rely on qualitative evaluations performed by specially trained personnel, mostly available in tertiary medical centers or specialized facilities. Such approaches are high in cost, require geographic proximity to advanced healthcare resources, and yield mostly qualitative insight.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWireless, skin-integrated devices for continuous, clinical-quality monitoring of vital signs have the potential to greatly improve the care of patients in neonatal and pediatric intensive-care units. These same technologies can also be used in the home, across a broad spectrum of ages, from beginning to end of life. Although miniaturized forms of such devices minimize patient burden and improve compliance, they represent life-threatening choking hazards for infants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoft, skin-integrated electronic sensors can provide continuous measurements of diverse physiological parameters, with broad relevance to the future of human health care. Motion artifacts can, however, corrupt the recorded signals, particularly those associated with mechanical signatures of cardiopulmonary processes. Design strategies introduced here address this limitation through differential operation of a matched, time-synchronized pair of high-bandwidth accelerometers located on parts of the anatomy that exhibit strong spatial gradients in motion characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndwelling arterial lines, the clinical gold standard for continuous blood pressure (BP) monitoring in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), have significant drawbacks due to their invasive nature, ischemic risk, and impediment to natural body movement. A noninvasive, wireless, and accurate alternative would greatly improve the quality of patient care. Recently introduced classes of wireless, skin-interfaced devices offer capabilities in continuous, precise monitoring of physiologic waveforms and vital signs in pediatric and neonatal patients, but have not yet been employed for continuous tracking of systolic and diastolic BP-critical for guiding clinical decision-making in the PICU.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSkin-mounted soft electronics that incorporate high-bandwidth triaxial accelerometers can capture broad classes of physiologically relevant information, including mechano-acoustic signatures of underlying body processes (such as those measured by a stethoscope) and precision kinematics of core-body motions. Here, we describe a wireless device designed to be conformally placed on the suprasternal notch for the continuous measurement of mechano-acoustic signals, from subtle vibrations of the skin at accelerations of around 10 m s to large motions of the entire body at about 10 m s, and at frequencies up to around 800 Hz. Because the measurements are a complex superposition of signals that arise from locomotion, body orientation, swallowing, respiration, cardiac activity, vocal-fold vibrations and other sources, we exploited frequency-domain analysis and machine learning to obtain-from human subjects during natural daily activities and exercise-real-time recordings of heart rate, respiration rate, energy intensity and other essential vital signs, as well as talking time and cadence, swallow counts and patterns, and other unconventional biomarkers.
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