Dr. Deji Akinwande, a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering department and an affiliate of TMI, was awarded a contract of up to $2.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a governmental agency aimed at funding research that supports biomedical and health breakthroughs. This award will help advance Dr. Akinwande's development of a wearable blood pressure monitoring system, a key vital sign for assessing cardiovascular health.
Based on his previous work with graphene tattoos, the development of a continuous, real-world blood pressure monitoring will improve the accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility of tracking what is normally only taken in short snapshots during traditional blood pressure readings. With continuous monitoring, patients and their doctors will be able to better understand, diagnose, and manage high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death in the United States and around the world.
Akinwande's Unobtrusive Near-field Continuous Monitoring of Clinically Accurate Blood Pressure (CLINAC-BP) will use different technologies to measure changes in electrical properties of the arteries as the heart beats, which will then be converted into blood pressure values. Combining radio frequency monitoring technologies, hardware, and AI/software, this new wearable monitor will generate continuous data, helping doctors diagnose patients, as well as giving researchers access to large amounts of data that will hopefully generate new insights into disease prediction and care for cardiovascular and circulatory diseases.
This project is in collaboration with Professors Yaoyao Jia, an associate professor in ECE at UT, and Hirofumi Tanaka, director of UT's Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory, as well as Edgar Lobaton, a professor of ECE at North Carolina State University.
This multi-year project is part of ARPA-H's focus on proactive health, funding research that hopes to reduce the likelihood that people become patients and creating new capabilities for early detection of disease risks, as well as promoting treatments and behaviors that are a threat to Americans' health.
