Asthma affects more than 4.6 million children in the United States, according to the most recent data available through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2021, this accounted for more than 270,000 visits to emergency departments, more than 27,000 in-patient stays in hospitals and 145 deaths.
Bioengineering seniors, from left, Rutvij Chaudhary, Anushka Mishra, Alisha Onkar and Laya Kalita test the medical technology device they plan to present at the College of Engineering’s Senior Design Expo on Friday, Dec. 6. Breath Buddy is a wearable device designed to identify asthmatic breathing patterns in children.
At The University of Toledo’s College of Engineering, a team of bioengineering seniors is interested in helping children affected by this chronic inflammation of the lungs that causes coughing, wheezing or shortness of breath.
Rutvij Chaudhary, Laya Kalita, Anushka Mishra and Alisha Onkar have been working on a wearable device to identify asthmatic breathing patterns in children, who they reason may not be as quick to identify symptoms of a potential attack as adult asthma patients with more experience preventing and treating them.
“The idea is to be able to alert the child and their caretakers of an asthma attack so that the child can quickly get the help they need,” Mishra said.
Chaudhary, Kalita, Mishra and Onkar will present their prototype, called Breath Buddy, at the College of Engineering’s Senior Design Expo from noon to 3 p.m. Friday, Dec. 6, on the first floor of Nitschke Hall. They will join more than 70 teams in presenting senior design projects that showcase students’ creativity and ingenuity as they tackle real-life challenges, in some cases in collaboration with local partners like Metroparks Toledo, the Lucas County Engineer’s Office and St. John Lutheran Church in Williston.
One team of civil and environmental engineering seniors — Robert Belair, Seth Deitering, Collin Gaerke, Alexus Hofacre and Alexander Neumann — will present a stormwater management system for a warehouse facility designed to meet its local regulatory requirements for stormwater quantity and quality control.
The stormwater management system is a finalist in the Contech Urban Stormwater and Drainage Competition.
“The Senior Design Expo is a long-standing community engagement tradition and the culmination of years of experiential learning opportunities that begin in a student’s first semester at the College of Engineering,” said Dr. Mohammad Elahinia, interim dean of the college. “We always look forward to seeing how our graduating seniors are solving problems in our community and creating innovative solutions by applying what they’ve learned through their courses and co-ops.”
Visitor parking for the Senior Design Expo is free in Area 20. For more information on the event, visit the College of Engineering website.
Chaudhary, Kalita, Mishra and Onkar share an interest in medical technology, which has been bolstered by off-campus semesters working with medical technology companies through the college’s integrated co-op program that guarantees engineering science students log at least one full year of paid work experience before graduation.
Mishra credits a conversation with her grandfather, who has asthma, as the inspiration for Breath Buddy.
“I was just talking to my family about ideas and he brought up asthma,” she recalled. “I said, I can’t fix it, but maybe I can do something about it. So we all started researching, and we found out that every element we would need to use in our prototype was something that we’ve learned throughout the bioengineering program.”
The team started the semester by building a type of machine learning model called a neural network, training it on audio clips of a wide variety of breathing samples.
This presented their first challenge: While they started writing code in MATLAB, a programming language and platform that they’d used throughout their academic program, they quickly realized that the task was better suited to another platform.
“We had to teach ourselves some Python,” said Chaudhary, crediting the support of Dr. Scott Pappada, an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering who teaches Biosignaling Processing. “We spent a lot of time with Dr. Pappada.”
Once the neural network was able to reliably differentiate audio of asthmatic breathing patterns from non-asthmatic breathing patterns, they turned their attention to the approximately 4-inch device that would utilize it. Consisting of a microphone, a microprocessor and battery, this device is intended to be worn in a strap around the chest and positioned to pick up a wearer’s breathing patterns.
An asthma diagnosis is communicated, where appropriate, through an LCD screen.
The team is still hard at work in the days leading up to the Senior Design Expo, teasing out the best way to pick up the sounds of a wearer’s breathing — generally quite hushed, especially when a wearer is not experiencing asthma symptoms.
With more time they could suggest even more improvements, they said. Maybe a noise or flashing light to signal when asthmatic breathing patterns have been detected, or an alert system for out-of-sight caretakers incorporating Bluetooth or WiFi
“The technology works,” Mishra said, “but there’s still a lot we could do with it.”
