Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In North America approximately 20 million people are diagnosed by sleep apnea, however, due to discomfort, only 8 million use their prescribed sleep-assistance device such as their continuous positive airway pressure device (CPAP). NovaResp Technologies Incorporated ("NovaResp") is developing devices and techniques that will reduce the short- and long-term damages caused by obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and will directly address the current market need of making sleep-assistance device more comfortable. While using advanced forced oscillation technique (FOT) would lead to faster detection and reactive treatment of OSA, as well as better management of patients' respiratory health, current CPAP machines are incapable of incorporating such methods without disturbing the patient. NovaResp is working on a revolutionary technique to predict respiratory failure such as obstruction in OSA through machine learning techniques. Using FOT data, these machine learning methods will lead to the preemptive avoidance of obstruction by adjusting CPAP's settings before a failure occurs. However, incorporation of modern FOT methods on such ventilators/CPAP devices would require miniaturization of traditional FOT. The main objective of this research proposal is to design a new miniaturized, energy efficient, cost-effective, FOT wearable device using modern integrated circuits and signal processing. This device will be able to be used as an add-on to mechanical ventilators such as CPAP machines to detect and predict sleep apnea episodes. This device will also provide real-time respiratory impedance measurement and recording outside the clinic. This will help in the creation of a big-data database that will allow medical doctors and researchers to better understand the pulmonary dynamics as well as to enable early detection of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).