Internet of Wearable E-Textiles for Telemedicine

Abstract: With nearly 10 million individuals carrying a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease across the globe. Individuals with Parkinson's disease experience tremors, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulties with walking and driving. Currently these individuals are required to attend weekly visits to the doctor's office for consistent reassessment regarding progression of the disease.

In this NSF CAREER Project, PI Mankodiya's team is designing KAYA, a smart textile internet of things framework that aims at providing telemedicine interventions at home. KAYA allows the healthcare providers to observe a regimen of motor screening involving motor tasks such as finger tapping, hand flipping, toe tapping, and foot stomping. The performance of these tasks assist the care team in personalizing the treatment plan. This is especially critical for assisting patients with deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants. Here, neurologists use feedback from the assessments to improve the electrical stimulations needed for the DBS implants. In contrary, the existing screening process is tedious and inefficient leaving the performance evaluation subjective to the neurologists who counts observational scores for each patient in the clinic.

The motor tasks are examined using textile sensors, integrated into "Smart Gloves" and "Smart Insoles" with Bluetooth Low-Energy communication for data recording. Smart textile wearables utilize a patient-friendly companion Android app capable of connecting to an Home Area Network. The app has a guided instruction set on how to perform motor tasks. Once the tasks are completed, the dataset and subsequent scores are sent to any/all applicable subscribers. This subscription model emphasizes an analytical approach to a network of concurrent clinical data. This process simultaneously allows the care team to make data-driven decisions regarding Parkinson's disease therapies such as DBS.

Currently, the CAREER project is for five years and is currently in its second year. Currently, we are performing two studies: 1) a Parkinson study for the validation of gloves and 2) a study with healthy older adults for the validation of insoles. These studies will provide ample data enabling the development of intelligent edge algorithms for real-time actuation control for patient interaction.

Explanation of Demonstration: We will present Smart Textile Wearables designed for Telemedicine Interventions of Parkinson's Disease. Smart gloves and insoles measure movement symptoms using fabric-based force and flex sensors synced into a close-loop Body Sensor Networks. We have started a data collection in older adults.