Wearable Wireless Monitoring Systems for Warfighter Health Monitoring in Extreme Environments
Abstract
Osseointegrated prostheses have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of life of warfighters who suffer the loss of a limb. While osseointegrated prostheses eliminate the drawbacks of ???strap on??? socket prostheses, they have their own limitations including high rates of infection and fracture of the host bone. As the medical community advances osseointegration for future prostheses, there is a growing need to monitor the integration and performance of the implanted prosthesis. A unified in vivo/ex vivo sensing architecture is proposed herein for monitoring osseointegrated prostheses. First, biocompatible thin film sensors are proposed for in vivo placement in the host limb to monitor the mechanical behavior of the osseointegrated prosthesis and the in vivo conditions of the host tissue. Additive thin film manufacturing of lithographically patterned materials on biocompatible thin film substrates is proposed to create an array of sensing transducers including those capable of measuring strain, pH and temperature. Inductive wireless interfaces are integrated in the thin film sensors to provide a means of poweringand reading sensor outputs from outside the limb. Second, the effort also explores the adoption of ex vivo sensors that can be attached to the percutaneous extension of the osseointegrated prosthesis. In particular, piezoelectric transducers are proposed to introduce body waves into the prosthesis to assess its structural condition and integration with the host bone. The in vivo and ex vivo sensing strategies are unified into a single monitoring system through the use of a compact wireless sensing node that interrogates the in vivo sensors (through inductive coupling) and ex vivo sensors. Thenode is designed with a computational core so that embedded machine learning analytics can be used to identify anomalous events (e.g., infection, bone fracture). The functionality of the unified sensing architecture will be validated in the laboratory on prosthetic models consisting of stainless steel or titanium femoral stems implanted in synthetic sawbones and sheep/pig bones.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 26, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812477
Entities
People
- Jerome Lynch
Organizations
- Board of Regents of the University of Michigan
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy