Two teams from the Software Engineering department were selected to participate at the KAUST undergraduate poster research competition to be held on the week of January 17th- 23. The team members are: Sara Alarifi, Alanoud Albaiz, Abeer Alissa, Fatemah Alshaikh and Shaden Alhedaithy. They work under the supervision of Dr. Manar Alalfi an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering in collaboration with Dr. AbdulKarim S. AlMakadma an Assistant Professor of clinical Medicine and Pediatrics from the College of Medicine. The superb teams are designing and developing a framework to monitor the vital signs of outpatients under medical attention.
In their submission, the team wrote “The intent is to make the patient’s activity available to their caregivers (health professionals and family members), who can recognize potentially subtle harmful events and also alert the patient via audible notification or otherwise. Event detection can be identified by mining methods for recognizing pre-specified patterns of sensor readings indicative of potential problems in order to alert caregivers and cause them to intervene. Finally, analytics methods inspect the archive of recorded sensor readings in order to extract patterns and to recognize trends associated with clinically significant symptoms. The motivation behind the research project is to create an intelligent system that supports dependent outpatients that either can’t gather their own vital signs or may be living alone and not be able to act upon sudden emergency. After preliminary research, the two focal cases during the development will be postsurgical patients and asthma patients. Postsurgical patients require very keen monitoring since they’re prone to get internal bleeding which can be subtle and pass unnoticed at first due to the distress the patient is already in, however patients suffering from respiratory distress can get very obvious Asthma attacks but the danger lies in them being secluded from anyone who can actively help. With this, we’d have two cases covering a variety of scenarios.”
It is worth mentioning that the teams’ work did already attract attention from Mr. Abdullah Al-Swaha, Deputy General Manager & OD at Cisco who offered an unconditional support to polish the team’s entrepreneur skills in order to help accelerate bringing the planned product to market.
