Heading into the fall, with little end in sight for the coronavirus pandemic, spells worry for the more paranoid among us. Was that cough symptomatic of a cold, the flu or Covid-19—or just a piece of dust catching in the throat? Is this fatigue related to coronavirus, or has the cold weather slowed us down?
Luckily, a team of eight students at the University of Rhode Island (URI) has stepped in to answer those questions with data. The students, from various engineering and computer science disciplines, have developed what they call "RespDetect," a smart mask capable of monitoring and detecting Covid-19 symptoms.
The mask is equipped with a respiration sensor, a throat microphone and an ear temperature sensor. Using that hardware, RespDetect monitors the wearer's breathing rate, body temperature and coughing rate, data it records wirelessly using an app. Doctors and nurses can use that data to decide how best to treat each patient.
“We hope to come up with an inexpensive licensing model to fund this project sustainably, while also enabling improved access to high quality personal protective equipment for patients and frontline healthcare workers,” Vignesh Ravichandran, an electrical engineering major who worked on systems design and hardware development for RespDetect, said in a statement released by URI on Tuesday.
Ravichandran and the rest of the team started working on the smart mask in the spring, in URI Associate Professor Kunal Mankodiya’s Wearable Biosensing Laboratory. Mankodiya, who was the group's primary adviser, has had his hands busy with coronavirus response: He is also the unofficial founder of the "Rapid Responders," a group of scholars and hobbyists who stepped up to print personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers this summer amid shortages.
The URI team entered RespDetect in a Covid-19-themed design competition sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Circuits and Systems Society (IEEE CASS) this summer. On Sept. 7, IEEE announced it had won third place.
The team is invited to present the mask at the IEEE International Virtual Symposium on Circuits & Systems on Oct. 10.
