Research

This project extends blood prior work without the need for an attachment. We found that we can accurately measure applied force on a smartphone using the internal vibration motor and accelerometer. Thus, we are investigating the potential to use any smartphone as a blood pressure monitor. For more information, read the  initial (preprint) paper.

This is an ongoing effort to enable a smartphone to calculate blood pressure similar to FDA approved devices. Instead of estimating blood pressure using data driven approaches or other physiological features like Pulse Transit Time or Pulse Arrival Time, we are developing a methodology to enable blood pressure calculations on the smartphone that rely on the conventional oscillometric method used in blood pressure cuff devices.  For more information, read the full  paper.

Post surgical recovery is a multi-billion dollar problem with the potential to save countless lives. Following a surgery, hospitals attempt to monitor patients as they recover from a weak, post-surgical state to a more normal, healthy state. Post surgical complications, such as infection, can lead to adverse outcomes including death. In this collaboration, we seek to leverage smartphone measurements to provide digital biomarkers of post surgical recovery. More information will be available after publication.

Increasingly more research investigates the use of smartphone camera photoplethysmography (PPG) from applications of heart  rate detection to diabetes detection. The increasingly prevalence of PPG measurements motivates this work to ensure that PPG measurements are consistent across devices. This work outlines a calibration technique to ensure consistency of multichannel PPG measurements  across different smartphones. For more information, read the full paper.

Building on our prior research in smartphone pupillometry, we aim to expand access to pupillometry by enabling all devices with RGB cameras to perform accurate pupillometry measurements. We demonstrate that accurate pupillometry can be performed in the far red light of the visible spectrum of most smartphone cameras by utilizing filters and wavelength specific LEDs. For more information, please refer to the publication: Racially fair pupillometry for RGB smartphone cameras using the far red spectrum.

We hope take steps towards improving populational screening of anemia by leveraging a smartphones. We use a scope attachment and simple electronics controlled by the smartphone to mimic multispectral imaging that allows hemoglobin measurements. More details will be available after publication.

This project is motivated by my current ongoing research with the Design lab and the UCSD Center for Mental Health Technologies. We realized the utility of an accessible pupillometer for neuropsychiatric research into attention, neurological diseases, cognitive function, and more. We successfully created a smartphone app to transform a smartphone into a pupillometer using near infrared camera components included for Facial Recognition. For more information, please refer to the paper: “Enabling Smartphone Pupillometry using a Facial Identification Camera in At-Home Environments”

This project is an ongoing collaboration with the Design Lab and Dr. Eric Granholm at the UCSD Center for Mental Health Technologies (MHTech). With the help of our collaborators, we are investigating the potential for using smartphones as a cheap, remote method of screening for Mild Cognative Impairment. This work builds upon the findings of Professor Granholm and other researchers that have shown connections between mild cognative impairment and pupillary response. In our research, we are deploying smartphones to older adults to remotely collect pupillary responses that can be correlated with prior patient data from the MHTech Center. 

 In this investigation, we draw out motifs around the challenges that are inherent to realizing this vision of smartphone-based medical sensing solutions. We further expound on this by juxtaposing the challenges with potential futures that we organize as tenets for how we could achieve more sustainable and universal development towards smartphone-based medical tricorders.