Wearable Medical Devices

Biomedical Engineering
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

"Designing for Well-being: Co-Creating a Wearable and Mobile App with Students and Teachers"
This presentation will describe the co-creation of a wearable and mobile app with secondary school students and staff members in Ireland, guided by participatory design and positive technology frameworks. Following a needs assessment, students and staff from four schools engaged in co-design sessions to identify desired features for supporting stress management and general wellbeing. Based on their designs, the "Wellby" system was developed as an open-source, affordable, and customizable wearable device that uses photoplethysmography (PPG) to track heart rate and heart rate variability. The connected mobile app includes features outlined by students, such as a breath pacer, mood tracker, and calendar. Students then tested Wellby for two months at the end of their school year to provide acceptability and usability feedback on the wearable and app design. We also evaluated machine learning algorithms to provide on-device stress and fatigue detection based on PPG signals and student self-reported wellbeing data. This presentation will detail the iterative participatory design and evaluation process of Wellby.

Bio: Justin Laiti received a B.S. degree in biomedical engineering from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, in 2022. He was awarded a U.S. Fulbright grant to pursue a Ph.D. at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), where he is currently in his fourth year. He is interested in understanding how to develop safe, personalizable, and adaptable digital technologies to promote wellbeing. His PhD research focuses on co-creation processes with students and teachers to develop a wearable and mobile app for stress management and overall wellbeing.

President and CEO
HL Medical Systems, Inc.

"A Novel Approach to Breast Tumor Detection"
Our mission at HL Medical Systems is to make the clinical breast exam (CBE) consistent, defensible, and clinically actionable. The current CBE is only around 55% sensitive to tumors and highly inconsistent. The Myra Scanner takes the guess work out of a traditional CBE. It uses electrical impedance to detect the presence of tumorous anomalies during a breast exam. The Myra Scanner fits in the palm of your hand and elevates the repeatability, depth, and precision of the palpation exam. With this device, clinicians are able to increase their likelihood of detecting breast tumors and initiate therapy earlier, resulting in a significantly higher chance of survival. 

Bio: Hassaan Khan is a biomedical mechanical engineer, product designer, and an entrepreneur. He is the president and CEO of HL Medical Systems, an early start up focusing in improving the quality of the clinical breast exam. Hassaan has worked in the medical device industry for over 10 years at companies such as Medtronic, Abbott, and Coloplast. His experience ranges from class 3 pacing implants to lead delivery systems as an engineer and technical lead. Hassaan currently works as a systems lead at Honeywell Aerospace, developing cutting edge navigation systems. 

Professor
Virginia Tech

"You Promised me Smart Clothes and All I Got was this Watch!"
Electronic textiles (e-textiles) are fabrics where electronics and interconnections are an integral part of the cloth.  When e-textiles became a popular research topic in the early 2000s, they were anticipated to become a platform for a wide variety of applications in entertainment, sports, and healthcare. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the history of e-textiles. It will then describe a series of speculations as to why the market for e-textiles has not grown. 

Bio: Tom Martin is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, with courtesy appointments in the School of Architecture, the School of Design, Engineering Education, Computer Science, and Health Systems and Implementation Science. He is the Interim Co-Executive Director of the Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, and Associate Dean for Strategic Research Advancement at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching interests include wearable computing, electronic textiles, interdisciplinary design teams, arts-integrated research, and smart health.

Professor
Design Innovation
University of Minnesota

"Developing and Testing Wearable Devices using Advanced Mannequins"
One of the persistent challenges of developing wearable devices is the need for a human stand-in for laboratory testing. Often, standard display or clothing design mannequins are insufficient for the needs of testing wearable technology products. This talk will explore a few case studies of advanced mannequin technologies developed for specific use-cases in the design and development of wearable technologies, including providing human-like inputs, measuring relationships between bodies and body-worn products, and measuring effects of wearables on human bodies. 

Bio: Lucy Dunne, PhD, is a professor of Apparel Design and co-director of the Wearable Technology Lab in the UMN College of Design. Her research focuses on developing e-textile and garment-form wearable devices, investigating influencing factors like anthropometrics and human-device interaction, and advancing the state of the art in manufacturing and use of apparel and wearables. She is co-author of "Functional Clothing Design: from Sportswear to Space Suits" (Bloomsbury, 2015).

CTO, RxFunction

Adjunct Professor, University of Minnesota

Bio: Lars Oddsson, PhD, is a biomedical scientist, an inventor and entrepreneur. He is CTO and Co-Founder of RxFunction, a start-up that has commercialized Walkasins, a wearable sensory prosthesis for balance. Dr. Oddsson teaches in the Medical Device Innovation program at the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota and is Adjunct Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences at the Medical School. He is a visiting professor at the Recanati School of Health Professions at Ben-Gurion University in Israel. He is a co-investigator and consultant to NASA’s Johnson Space Center on projects related to the development of sensorimotor countermeasures to long-term spaceflight.