Biomedical engineering student named to 30 Under 30

By Gabe Cherry
Michigan Engineering

University of Michigan biomedical engineering doctoral student Barry Belmont has been named to Manufacturing Engineering Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list. Published annually, the list recognizes the best and brightest manufacturing professionals under 30 years old.

The magazine chose Belmont, 27, for his accomplishments in developing and manufacturing new devices, including the wearable circulation sensor he’s developing to track circulating blood volume in hospital patients.

Manufacturing Engineering also recognized his teaching accomplishments as a graduate student instructor; he taught a course in biomedical engineering innovative design and quickly earned a reputation as an inspiring–and demanding–instructor.

In addition to his work as a graduate student instructor, Belmont participates in a variety of efforts to build interest in science and technology, including creating videos that promote engineering and participating in STEM outreach programs with K-12 students.

“I think there’s a definite need for us to understand science and technology better than we do,” he said in an interview with Manufacturing Engineering Magazine, “To know the world around us—and the people in it—is a worthwhile pursuit…and I want to convince others of that.”

A U-M biomedical engineering graduate student since 2011, Belmont’s research focuses on non-invasive medical imaging and medical device manufacture. He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Wearable fluid status sensor could lead to new ‘vital sign’

By Gabe Cherry
Michigan Engineering

A wearable sensor being developed at the University of Michigan could provide doctors with the first simple, portable, non-invasive way to measure fluid status—the volume of blood that’s coursing through a patient’s blood vessels at any given time.

Fluid status is a diagnostic measure much like heart rate or blood pressure. It can alert doctors when a cardiac patient has excess fluid that prevents their heart from pumping efficiently or provide a more precise measure of how much waste fluid to filter out of a dialysis patient’s blood. It can also tell doctors how much fluid to give to a trauma patient who has lost blood or a septic patient with an overwhelming infection.

But today, getting an accurate measure of fluid status requires an ultrasound or the insertion of a specialized catheter that measures the pressure of blood flowing through a blood vessel. Both tests are expensive and complex, and must be administered in a hospital by an expert.

The new sensor could change that by making measuring fluid status as simple as strapping a smartphone-sized device to a patient’s arm or leg and asking them to take a deep breath. And because it can be worn for extended periods of time, the device could provide doctors and caregivers with an unprecedented amount of real-time data about fluid status. Researchers will soon begin patient testing.

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“Our new sensor doesn’t require a lot of time or expertise, so it could be used in an intensive care unit, a small community clinic, an ambulance, by a patient at home, at an accident scene or even on the battlefield,” said Barry Belmont, a biomedical engineering doctoral student at U-M who is helping to develop the technology.

 “And it provides continuous, real-time data, which is wasn’t possible in the past.”

The device works uses a process called Dynamic Respiratory Impedance Volume Evaluation, or DRIVE, to measure the changes in “bioimpedance,” or electrical conductivity, of the wearer’s limb as they breathe. Blood is an excellent conductor of electricity, so a patient with more blood will have greater conductivity. It’s similar in principal to the ultrasound method of measuring fluid status, which directly measures the changes in the vena cava, the body’s largest vein. But instead of measuring vein size to calculate fluid status, the new device gets the same information by measuring bioimpedance. The new device isn’t the first to use this approach, but it’s the first to incorporate fluid status measurement into a wearable device.

The researchers say their technology could effectively make fluid status another vital sign.

“This could turn fluid status into a routine diagnostic tool, the way we measure heart rate and blood pressure today,” said Kevin Ward, executive director of the U-M Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC), which developed the concept and the device. “It has the potential to improve care and lower costs for millions of patients, and I think it’s a great example of how collaboration between fields like engineering and medicine can have a direct benefit on the lives of patients.”

The team has been testing a benchtop version of the sensor, built from off-the-shelf components, for more than a year. The new study will compare the accuracy of the wearable sensor to that of the conventional ultrasounds of the vena cava in patients undergoing dialysis or intensive care.

Current measurements like heart rate and blood pressure are diagnostic measurements that have been in place for decades or more. These methods don’t address accurately the issue that patients experiencing trauma, undergoing dialysis, or septic patients commonly have in that they can't capture the amount of blood flowing through a patient's blood vessels.

“Right now, doctors don’t have a good way to determine how much fluid to remove from a dialysis patient,” explains Hakam Tiba, a research investigator in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the U-M Health System. “They often end up removing too much, which can cause pain and fatigue, and it can also exacerbate other health problems. A wearable sensor would enable doctors to be much more precise by providing a real-time picture of the effect that dialysis has on a patient.”

A real-time stream of fluid status data could also help doctors provide better treatment to patients who need additional fluid, like sepsis patients, Belmont said. He expects the current round of testing to continue through the end of 2015. If the tests are successful, the device will go to the FDA for approval, which will likely take an additional two years before it’s available for broad use.

Funding and assistance for the project was provided by the University of Michigan Medical School’s Fast Forward Medical Innovation Translational Research and Commercialization for Life Sciences Program, by the University of Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care and by Baxter Healthcare Corporation.

U-M developing wearable tech for disease monitoring

By Catherine June
Michigan Engineering

A new wearable vapor sensor being developed at the University of Michigan could one day offer continuous disease monitoring for patients with diabetes, high blood pressure, anemia or lung disease.

Wearable technologies, which include Google Glass and the Apple iWatch, are part of a booming market that’s expected to swell to $14 billion in the next four years.

The new sensor, which can detect airborne chemicals either exhaled or released through the skin, would likely be the first wearable to pick up a broad array of chemical, rather than physical, attributes. U-M researchers are working with the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program to move the device from the lab to the marketplace.

“Each of these diseases has its own biomarkers that the device would be able to sense,” said Sherman Fan, a professor of biomedical engineering. “For diabetes, acetone is a marker, for example.”

Other chemicals it could detect include nitric oxide and oxygen, abnormal levels of which can point to conditions such as high blood pressure, anemia or lung disease.

Fan is developing the sensor with Zhaohui Zhong, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Girish Kulkarni, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering. The researchers say their device is faster, smaller and more reliable than its counterparts, which today are much too big to be wearable. The new sensor can also detect a broader array of chemicals.

Beyond disease monitoring, the sensor has other applications. It would be able to register the presence of hazardous chemical leaks in a lab, or elsewhere, or provide data about air quality.

“With our platform technology, we can measure a variety of chemicals at the same time, or modify the device to target specific chemicals. There are limitless possibilities,” Zhong said.

To create their technology, the researchers took a unique approach to detecting molecules.

“Nanoelectronic sensors typically depend on detecting charge transfer between the sensor and a molecule in air or in solution,” Kulkarni said.

However, these previous techniques typically led to strong bonds between the molecules being detected and the sensor itself. That binding leads to slow detection rates.

“Instead of detecting molecular charge, we use a technique called heterodyne mixing, in which we look at the interaction between the dipoles associated with these molecules and the nanosensor at high frequencies,” Girish said.

This technique, made possible through the use of graphene, results in extremely fast response times of tenths of a second, as opposed to the tens or hundreds of seconds typical in existing technology. It also dramatically increases the device’s sensitivity. The sensor can detect molecules in sample sizes at a ratio of several parts per billion.

These nanoelectronic graphene vapor sensors can be completely embedded in a microgas chromatography system, which is the gold standard for vapor analysis, the researchers say. The entire microgas chromatography system can be integrated on a single chip with low power operation, and embedded in a badge-sized device that can be worn on the body to provide noninvasive and continuous monitoring of specific health conditions.

“We believe this device can be extremely beneficial to society,” Fan said.

The technology is described in the paper, “Graphene nanoelectronic heterodyne sensor for rapid and sensitive vapour detection,” which is published in Nature Communications.