Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My research program employs Engineering techniques, in particular, electronics skills for the novel design of medical and research devices. Novel technologies will be developed and evaluated for two main challenging medical conditions: 1) quick and reliable diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) while people are awake, and 2) early diagnosis of Alzheimer's and predicting optimized and personalized treatment efficacy at baseline. This research program is aligned with the NSERC mandate through its focus on the development, verification and evaluation of novel devices and technologies with a wide range of potential future applications. In the context of OSA, more than 10% of Canadians are known to be affected, but it is also believed that many cases go undiagnosed. With no diagnosis, these OSA cases remain untreated; that imposes an immense physical and economic burden on society. The research proposed here will address this gap by investigating innovative ways to analyze and interpret biological data such as tracheal breathing sounds. This will lead to the design of novel medical technologies with future applications in point of care diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of not only OSA but also other infectious or chronic respiratory disorders. In the context of Alzheimer's, I propose to miniaturize and optimize Electrovestibulography (EVestG) for its applications to point-of-care diagnosis and monitoring. EVestG technology records vestibuloacoustic signals in the ear along with its neural event detection software focusing on the primitive links between balance regions and emotional and behavioural regions of the brain. Built upon my 12 years of proof-of-concept studies using EVestG for diagnosis of a wide variety of neurological disorders, I propose to develop a new miniaturized technology for recording vestibular recording signals in the ear conceptually similar to the current EVestG technology. The proposed objectives for this term of my DG program are to: 1) expand my current technology, called AWakeOSA, for estimating the severity of OSA using artificial intelligence (AI) modeling; 2) develop an acoustic model of the upper airway to identify the cause of OSA; 3) develop a new portable EVestG technology; 4) develop miniaturized MEMs electrodes for improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the EVestG signals. The above objectives will be achieved by applying artificial intelligence modeling to data (already collected), stochastic signal analysis, and design of microelectronic boards and MEMs electrodes, for which 13 HQP (9 new students) will be trained. Outcomes of this research are: a novel miniaturized EVestG to be used for variety clinical applications and a novel acoustic assessment for OSA severity and etiology within a few minutes. The impact of the proposed medical technologies is numerous as they will improve the quality of life of the large populations affected by OSA and dementia and well-being of aging population in general.