1st Prototype for CICaidA

The CICaidA Project – a Union of Art and Technology

CICaidA Team and faculty advisors Professor Ete Chan (Biomedical Engineering) and Professor Nobuho Nagasawa (Art)

In the current environment, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to increased activity in emergency rooms which were already severely understaffed. In nursing homes, due to differences in state-to-state regulations, some facilities have overnight staff ratios of one registered nurse to over 60 patients. The lack of sufficient staffing begs for more efficient monitoring systems that ensure a standard of quality care for our most vulnerable populations.

Continuous Individual Crisis Aid Alert System (CICaidA) is a biomedical sensor bracelet aimed to monitor patient vitals in real-time, with telemetry capabilities to update/alert healthcare workers at a central monitoring station. Using collected heart rate and SpO2 (peripheral blood oxygen saturation) data, both vital measurements in healthcare, CICaidA is able to determine the general physiological stability of the wearer and send out alerts if vitals deviate from the accepted thresholds. Although there are other wrist-worn sensors on the market, their inaccuracies in SpO2 readings and cost deem them to be unsuitable for use in a healthcare setting with patients who have the potential to rapidly deteriorate in health. The CICaidA device tackles the issues of racial bias in pulse oximetry, where there is a disparity between the accuracies of the sensor when measuring dark vs light skin tones. It has been shown that pulse oximeters often were less accurate in measuring dark skin tones as opposed to lighter skin tones, which often leads to decreases in the quality/accessibility of healthcare received.

Displayed is an early prototype of the CICaidA (the current prototype is still under development). The device consists of an Arduino Bluno, MAX30102 pulse oximeter, coin batteries, speaker, and a LED light strip wristband. This prototype of the device is able to intake vital sign data, then interpret and send that data via Bluetooth. Upcoming prototypes will be more compact and accurate in health readings.