Wearable lung sounds, fluid, and body temperature monitoring for patients with COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has tremendously impacted society, communities, and the healthcare system across the world, and threatens to continue to challenge society for the coming months and years. More than 1 million Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19, and more than 60,000 Americans have lost their lives as of the writing of this proposal. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a wearable physiological sensing solution for COVID-19 patient management, including diagnosis, triage, and monitoring of patients based on lung sounds, lung fluid, body temperature, and inertial measures captured with the same device. The central innovation lies in the hardware and algorithms that have been proposed for this purpose, building upon the team's prior work in other areas of wearable bio-acoustic sensing and bioimpedance spectroscopy. The following two specific aims are proposed for the research: (1) to design, implement, and validate a wearable sensing system for lung sounds, lung fluid, body temperature, and inertial measurements; and (2) to test and evaluate this system to assess efficacy and potential information derived in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and persons under investigation for COVID-19 longitudinally. Successful completion of this project would result in a validated prototype for sensing multiple parameters of cardiopulmonary health in patients with COVID-19, with imminent feasibility to transition the technology to commercialization and through regulatory pathways. This would provide a much-needed patient management technology for this novel coronavirus to healthcare practitioners and ultimately a means to monitor patients remotely to ensure that any deterioration in health is detected as early as possible.