Most of us feel as though we can't live without our smartphones, but what if your phone could actually save your life? UAlberta researchers are exploring ways that device in your pocket could be a lifesaver. Here are three ideas presented in three minutes by under-35 researchers at a Dragons' Den-style event called Falling Walls Lab UAlberta, part of an international competition designed to showcase the talents of the up-and-coming generation of innovators.
Dialling in insulin levels
Pretty much nobody likes being poked with needles, but more than 37 million people in the world with Type 1 diabetes need insulin injections at least three times a day because their bodies produce little or none of this essential hormone, which allows the body to use and store glucose from the carbohydrates in food. UAlberta student Nermeen Youssef, a PhD candidate in Peter Light's laboratory at the Alberta Diabetes Institute, is working to eliminate the need for needles by engineering a person's own fat cells to secrete insulin in response to blue light. Fat cells already have the ability to produce hormones. By using an accepted procedure called fat transfer, doctors could remove some cells from a patient's body and engineer those cells to secrete insulin in response to blue light. The cells would then be transplanted back into the person's body.
One challenge is figuring out how to monitor insulin levels and control how much light the fat cells receive. That's where the smartphone comes in.
Wireless technologies exist already to detect blood sugar. By connecting this information to an app on a patient's phone, the software would calculate how much insulin the patient needs. It would then trigger a wearable blue-light-emitting patch to deliver the right number of pulses to the light-sensitive fat cells. Patients could live injection-free and better control their insulin levels, reducing the risk of diabetes complications such as blindness, nerve damage and kidney disease.
Youssef, a finalist at Falling Walls Lab UAlberta, went on to win second place for this idea at the 2014 international Falling Walls competition in Berlin, beating out nearly 1,000 other participants.
Stage of development: The team has already shown that cells can be engineered to produce insulin in response to blue light. They filed a provisional patent last fall and will be filing for a full patent in November 2015.
When the public might see it: About 10 years
Opening a window into the heart
Naresh Miriyala wants to improve people's chances of surviving heart attacks. There are an estimated 70,000 heart attacks per year in Canada, approximately one every seven minutes, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. Miriyala, a UAlberta PhD student in engineering, says people experiencing heart attacks often don't seek treatment soon enough. Symptoms are sometimes hard to recognize because not everyone experiences chest pain; some have pain in other parts of the body, nausea, shortness of breath, sweating or light-headedness. Going to an emergency room can be inconvenient, expensive and frustrating, and if a person doesn't realize what's happening, he or she may delay or decide not to seek help. Once at the hospital, procedures to detect signs of a heart attack can be laborious, meaning even more delays.
Miriyala and Naga Siva Kumar Gunda, '14 PhD, launched a company called MyoNexus Diagnostics Inc. to develop technologies to detect the signs of heart attacks earlier. Their team designed a testing device called a "cardio chip" that is "rapid, portable, inexpensive and sensitive" and could be used in clinics, nursing homes, ambulances, emergency rooms and hospitals. As with a glucometer - a handheld device diabetics often use to monitor blood sugar - the user places a small sample of blood on the chip, which checks for three potential cardiac markers (substances released into the blood when the heart is damaged). If the chip changes colour, the patient is likely experiencing a heart attack. First responders can also plug the chip into a reader that attaches to a smartphone, allowing them to read the data and communicate the results to a physician to assess.
This simple screening test could allow more accurate treatment decisions to be made more quickly, saving lives. Miriyala also believes it could save the Canadian health-care system as much as $3 billion a year by avoiding expensive tests for look-alike symptoms that aren't cardiac emergencies.
Stage of development: Real-time blood analysis has been tested in partnership with the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute. The team has done further tests on the device to quantify the cardio marker and is moving ahead with the regulatory approval process.
When the public might see it: The team hopes consumers will find the device on pharmacy shelves soon after regulatory approvals are complete.
Check out this earlier article about the project from the Faculty of Engineering
Teaching lifesaving 'reading' skills
One of the most common diagnostic tools for heart problems is the electrocardiogram, the machine often shown on hospital dramas, where the nurse attaches electrodes to the patient's body, and then the heart's electrical activity is displayed on a graph with those familiar sharp peaks and valleys accompanying the heart's rhythm. Skilled readers can look at an ECG and learn a lot about the size, shape and position of the heart, the regularity of the heartbeat, any damage to the heart and other important data. But learning to read an ECG accurately is difficult. Studies of ECG reading accuracy have found that more than 60 per cent of critical diagnoses can be missed by medical students, and 20 to 40 per cent of critical diagnoses can be missed by practising physicians. Cardiology fellow Abhinav Sharma wanted to find a way to improve those potentially lifesaving diagnostic outcomes.
Strong ECG pattern recognition skills can take years to develop, especially using traditional lecture approaches. So Sharma's team, including computer scientists, engineers and physicians, developed an app to help medical students become better ECG readers. The approach breaks down the ECG into its basic components and exposes students to small segments of the ECG at rapid speeds and high volumes, accelerating the development of pattern recognition skills. In a randomized, controlled trial conducted at UAlberta using this method, students went from missing 70 per cent of critical diagnoses to missing less than 10 per cent. The app is inexpensive and can be used on multiple portable devices, including smartphones, tablets and laptops.
Stage of development: Although it was originally designed for medical students, the app is now being used by nurses, emergency medical technicians and firefighters across Canada as well, allowing those frontline workers to help make critical diagnoses sooner. It's also being shared with universities in India and Africa.
When the public might see it: It's in the testing phase and will be available for viewing within a few months.
Other lifesaving UAlberta mobile technology projects
Keeping people with dementia safe
The Locator Device Project helps prevent people with dementia from wandering into harm's way by using GPS devices that caregivers can track using Google Maps, text messages and emails.
The Faculty of Extension's MARS Lab's Project Backpage partners with the Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation to use FrontlineSMS to help communicate with women who may be trafficked and exploited and enable them reach out for support.
Jonathan White's award-winning Surgery 101 podcasts are available as a smartphone app, allowing medical students to access the popular medical education series on their mobile devices
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