Steve Dou, a California high school senior, has created a smartwatch to detect drug overdoses before they're fatal. The device uses a complex system of biosensors built by Steve that can monitor a user's body around the clock, detecting changes indicative of an overdose in measurements such as oxygen level, heart rate, and muscle movement.
Steve came up with the idea for his smartwatch at the age of 13 when he witnessed his brother suffer an opioid overdose that almost took his life. Determined to make a change, Steve cold-emailed numerous research groups, and when he was in ninth grade, a researcher at the University of Central Florida invited him to join a bioengineering lab. Steve has been working on the project for more than 3 years now.
"Life-saving medications like naloxone are designed to rapidly reverse overdoses, but they won't matter if nobody is nearby to administer them during an overdose," says Milad Hamidi, Steve's research supervisor at the University of Central Florida. "Steve's invention, the Rescue Response Smartwatch, helps solve that problem by bringing an alarm system to the wrist of the user."
If the user's measurements were to pass a threshold, the smartwatch would automatically send an alert to 911. To establish the threshold measurements, Steve collaborated with the Orlando Regional Medical Center to obtain de-identified clinical datasets from overdose victims. The smartwatch's intelligent machine learning algorithm was trained on this data. Unlike previous technologies, Steve's smartwatch incorporates multiple biosensors and an onboard naloxone cartridge. The cartridge can be activated and used during an emergency to manage an overdose.
Steve has built dozens of copies of his Rescue Response Smartwatch, and he partnered with the North American Syringe Exchange Network to freely pass them out to homeless populations. This has been possible because each smartwatch only costs $41 to make, and Steve believes he could decrease it to as low as $22.
April 30, 2021 at 03:02PM
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High school senior invents Smartwatch to detect and treat overdoses - Medical Plastics News
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