Grant: Engage Grants Program

The Advanced Biosensor for Assessment, Treatment and Evaluation or ""ABATE"" System is a non-invasive method of diagnosing pain in soft tissue injuries. It is comprised of sensors, electronic circuitry to condition the sensor signals and a display to view the results. The sensor parameters are: Skin (contact) Temperature, Applied Pressure, Galvanic Skin Resistance (Conductivity), and Sub-surface Sound (Crepitus). All these sensors need to be packaged onto a single probe to allow a single pass to simultaneously gather the information from the sensors and display the information graphically onto a computer, which will have all the sensors arranged coaxially around the center of the probe tip. The probe will be tethered to the electronic circuitry via an umbilical cord. From the hand held probe, the signal will travel to the data logging circuitry where the sensor signals will be conditioned into a usable format by the software. The software will send the data to a computer via blue-tooth where a graphical representation of the data can be displayed and analyzed by the caregiver. The representative data will help to pinpoint the areas of the soft tissue where the caregiver needs to treat the patient. Typically the caregiver probes and prods the patient manually in the suspected areas of injury and undertakes a course of treatment in the general area. Using the sensor probe, changes in temperature of the skin surface, claminess(conductivity) of the skin, pressure of the probe against the skin and accompanying sound of underlying scar tissue which is disrupted as the probe moves across the skin are all indicators of damage to soft tissue. Using this method, the caregiver will be able to accurately and easily diagnose the exact areas of tissue damage, allowing treatment to be concentrated directly at the point of injury.