The National Institutes of Health (NIH), specifically the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), has awarded $1,197,891 to Purdue Polytechnic Institute’s Miad Faezipour and her team to develop a groundbreaking smart pacifier that could transform the way doctors monitor infant breathing. Faezipour is an associate professor in the School of Engineering Technology.
Respiratory diseases are among the leading causes of infant hospitalization, with over several hundred thousand newborns admitted each year for breathing complications. Current monitoring tools are not designed for fragile newborns, leaving a major gap in respiratory monitoring and care.
The Purdue-led project will spend four years working to close that gap with a pacifier that uses sound sensing technology and artificial intelligence (AI)-based analysis to track babies’ breathing in real time, safely and non-invasively. The device analyzes breathing sounds to assess the infant’s cardiopulmonary function and wirelessly transmits data to a parent’s phone or a physician’s laptop, making it easier to detect problems early at home or in the hospital.
Faezipour disclosed the smart pacifier to the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization, which has applied for a patent to protect the intellectual property. Industry partners interested in developing or commercializing the work should contact Patrick Finnerty, assistant director of business development and licensing, life sciences, at pwfinnerty@prf.org about track code 70507.
The team believes the implications of this work could impact more than newborn care; the active sound sensing technology could also be implemented as a smartphone app to monitor respiratory health in people of all ages.
Faezipour’s grant is Purdue Polytechnic Institute’s first R01 award. R01 is the NIH's most commonly used grant program for independent research projects that support an investigator’s specific interest and competencies.
“An NIH R01 award is a major milestone for a tenure-track faculty member. It is extremely selective and difficult to get,” said Justin Yang, the associate dean for research at Purdue’s Polytechnic Institute.
This four-year project is a collaboration between Purdue University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), with Faezipour serving as the single principal investigator. Co-investigators are Smriti Bhatt (Department of Computer and Information Technology), S. Abdollah Mirbozorgi (UAB), and neonatologists Dr. Namasivayam Ambalavanan and Dr. Colm P. Travers (UAB School of Medicine).
