CAREER: CPS: Internet of Wearable E-Textiles for Telemedicine
Lead PI:
Kunal Mankodiya
Abstract
This CAREER project aims to translate the smart electronic textile (e-textile) technologies to fill the need for telemedicine. For example, there are around 10 million individuals across the globe who live with Parkinson's disease. They are majorly elderly patients who experience tremors, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulties in walking and driving. Despite their disabling condition, they need to make periodic visits to clinics for progressive checks and interventions. The project specifically targets improving treatments for patients with deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants because specialized neurologists find DBS treatments very complex and time consuming. It is very important for the doctors to personalize the electrical stimulations for each and every patient. The proposed research establishes an intelligent infrastructure in patients' homes so that patients, without visiting clinics, could independently perform a medical screening consisting of movement exercises such as finger tapping, hand flipping, toe tapping, and foot stomping. Moreover, the system builds upon modern internet-of-things technologies to keep neurologists in the loop to execute telemedicine interventions. The project will result into an in-home, wearable internet-of-things hub (referred to as "IoT-Hub") consisting of smart e-textiles such as e-gloves, e-socks, and companion computing devices for data analytics, storage, and communications to the cloud servers of hospitals. IoT Hub will have unique features to translate the medical care from hospitals to homes: 1) the measurements of movement symptoms with a medical-grade precision through sensors woven into e-gloves and e-socks, 2) the patient-friendly interface driven by intelligent close-loop algorithms running on tablet computers, and 3) clinical data analytics for neurologists to make data-driven informed decision on DBS treatments. The proposed IoT-Hub closes the knowledge gap between the areas of IoT, healthcare, smart textiles, and patient-centered design - all of which require interdisciplinary scientific discoveries and innovations. This project will have a potentially profound impact on the growing number of elderly patients living with Parkinson's disease or other neurological conditions. Intelligent algorithms for wearable embedded systems, e-textile designs and circuits, and de-identified telemedicine data will be broadly disseminated to the scientific community. The PI has developed a unique IoT curriculum at URI that involves a series of design-centered activities; an IoT hack-a-thon for entrepreneurial thinking; and awearable IoT course for university students to learn innovating personalized health and wellness solutions; and wearable engineering program to engage high school students in hands-on engineering activities.
Kunal Mankodiya

Dr. Kunal Mankodiya is the Director of Wearable Biosensing Lab and is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Rhode Island, RI, USA since 2014. He pursued his postdoctoral research at Intel Science & Technology Center (ISTC) affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Luebeck, Germany. He holds MS (University of Luebeck, Germany) and BE (Saurashtra University, India) degrees in Biomedical Engineering. He is a recipient of NSF (2016) CRII and NSF (2017) CAREER Awards. He received TechConnect Defense Innovation Award in 2018. He was recognized as the “Innovator-of-the-year” by Future Textiles Awards, Frankfurt, Germany in 2017. Mankodiya was also selected among “40 under 40” by Providence Business News in 2017. His embedded computing design of a smart-textile ECG system earned him the 2010 SYSTEX Award, University of Ghent, Belgium. He has published a book on wearable health monitoring that serves as a hands-on guide to program high-end application processors for healthcare applications. He regularly organizes scientific workshops/symposiums on IOT for healthcare at various international conferences. He also organizes Hack-a-Thons every year to promote entrepreneurial thinking in the areas including IOT, healthcare, and aging. His course on Wearable IOT blends design thinking with IOT concepts to nurture entrepreneurial skills in students from various backgrounds.

Performance Period: 06/01/2017 - 05/31/2022
Institution: University of Rhode Island
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1652538