Wearable Sensors for Chronic and Infectious Disease Monitoring

Title: Wearable Sensors for Chronic and Infectious Disease Monitoring

Abstract: The majority of the health care costs related to the treatment of chronic and infectious diseases are attributed to direct care costs (e.g., hospital admissions and readmissions). The prevalence of chronic diseases and associated costs in the United States is growing at an alarming pace. The COVID-19 pandemic has further impacted the health of high-risk individuals by increasing the likelihood of more severe illness for those with underlying health conditions and associated healthcare costs. There have been ample efforts from researchers and clinicians to develop remote healthcare systems and wearable devices to manage patients with chronic and infectious diseases in home settings, which has reduced the burden on inpatient care facilities and gained further momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there is a lack of reliable wearable devices that can provide clinically acceptable information to healthcare professionals, as well as a lack of emphasis on validating technologies in representative populations to enable a reliable and equitable remote health management system. This talk will present the challenges and potential solutions for developing tools (i.e., wearable sensors and computational algorithms) for reliable and equitable remote patient monitoring systems for chronic and infectious diseases. More specifically, the presenter will share the development and validation of wearable sensors and computational algorithms for cardiovascular health monitoring, particularly for patients with heart failure, and the development of an intelligent allocation method of diagnostic testing for COVID-19 using commercial wearables.

Bio: Md Mobashir Hasan Shandhi is an American Heart Association (AHA) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are developing biomedical sensors and corresponding signal processing and machine learning algorithms that can enable personalized healthcare and remote home monitoring for patients with chronic (cardiovascular, glycemic, and neurological) and infectious diseases. During his postdoc at Duke, he has been developing digital biomarkers of cardiovascular and glycemic health monitoring, as well as tools for infectious disease monitoring using wearables and patient-reported symptoms. During his Ph.D., he developed and validated wearable sensors to monitor cardiorespiratory fitness and pulmonary congestion in patients with heart failure. He has three years of experience as a lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at American International University, Bangladesh. He is also a council member of the Ethical AI Initiative, from the Center for Practical Bioethics. Dr. Shandhi is a recent recipient of the 2023 AHA postdoctoral fellowship.