Gutruf Leads Study on Wearable Sensors

A group of University of Arizona researchers are working to make wearable health devices more accessible by developing a system that can send health data up to 15 miles – much farther than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth systems can – without any significant infrastructure. Their device, they hope, will help make digital health access more equitable. The researchers introduced novel engineering concepts that make their system possible in a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

BME assistant professor Philipp Gutruf directed the study in the Gutruf Lab. Co-lead authors are Tucker Stuart, a UA biomedical engineering doctoral alumnus, and Max Farley, an undergraduate student studying biomedical engineering.

The Gutruf Lab calls the soft mesh wearable biosymbiotic, meaning it is custom 3D-printed to fit the user and is so unobtrusive it almost begins to feel like part of their body. The device, worn on the low forearm, stays in place even during exercise, ensuring high-quality data collection, Gutruf said. The user wears the device at all times, and it charges without removal or effort. Gutruf, Farley and Stuart plan to further improve and extend communication distances with the implementation of LoRa wireless area network gateways that could serve hundreds of square miles and hundreds of device users, using only a small number of connection points.

The wearable device and its communication system have the potential to aid remote monitoring in underserved rural communities, ensure high-fidelity recording in war zones, and monitor health in bustling cities, said Gutruf, whose long-term goal is to make the technology available to the communities with the most need.

"This effort is not just a scientific endeavor," he said. "It's a step toward making digital medicine more accessible, irrespective of geographical and resource constraints."