UC San Diego Researcher Receives NIH Trailblazer Award

Story by:

• Faith Nguyen- [email protected]

Media contact:

• Jesse Rutherford- [email protected]

Topics covered:

• Design
• Healthcare innovation

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The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded Edward Wang, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Design Lab, and his co-investigators, Byron Fergerson and Rodney Gabriel, with a Trailblazer award for using technology to transform healthcare. Their smartphone app prototype capitalizes on the handheld nature of a mobile phone and uses its built-in sensors to gauge grip strength to enhance preoperative screening for potential risks of complications post cardiac surgery.

The NIH Trailblazer Award is an R21 grant designed to provide investigators with the time and resources necessary to develop new or emerging research programs. Among its key objectives, the program aims to support high-risk/high-impact, technology-driven research, as demonstrated by the innovative project currently led by Wang and his team.

Imagine you are scheduled for open-heart surgery: you've mentally prepared, you've packed for a hospital stay, and your loved ones have rearranged their lives to care for you when you come home. The day of the surgery, you wake up early to be at the hospital and check in by 5:00 A.M. Once there, you undergo a routine pre-operative check-only to be told you're not strong enough for surgery that day and sent home.

Unfortunately for patients, doctors, and hospitals, this scenario is not uncommon. While physicians would like to routinely conduct pre-op frailty assessments in the weeks leading up to a surgery, there isn't a viable system in place in most hospitals to make this consistently feasible. The goal of this NIH Trailblazer award is to explore how a smartphone app can change this, enabling patients to test their grip strength on a frequent basis from the comfort of their own home.The app sends the data to their medical record for clinical monitoring. Not only does this assist with accurate surgery scheduling, it can let healthcare providers know whether the patient's grip strength shows any downward trends that may indicate nascent health concerns.

Byron Fergerson, a clinical professor of anesthesiology at UC San Diego Health, suggests the grip-strength app can be used both before surgery and to monitor progress afterward-a possible follow-on solution that could help prevent and detect potential perioperative complications.

"Routine access to perioperative medicine is not available in most hospitals," says Fergerson. "The more we can digitize and create surrogates of these measures, the more patients we can help."

In addition to the logical and emotional burden to the patient, last-minute surgery cancelations present high costs to hospitals and surgical centers: the operating room, clinical personnel, and equipment are suddenly idle, and administrative staff scramble to prepare the team and facility for another surgery. Time is lost that could be used to serve another patient.

The NIH Trailblazer award will support Wang's research group, the Digital Health Technologies Lab, in the amount of approximately $650,000 over a period of 3 years. This effort will contribute to the growing portfolio of smartphone-based health monitoring solutions actively being developed by Wang and his research team. Wang's vision is to leverage the billions of smartphones already in people's pockets, transform them into medical monitoring tools, and lay the infrastructure needed for democratizing health monitoring to the masses. His efforts towards this vision also includes activities as a faculty entrepreneur with a spinout company he co-founded called Billion Labs Inc., an NIH funded venture developing a smartphone-based blood pressure monitoring app towards FDA clearance.