Abstract

Do you know that someone has a heart attack by the time you finish reading this abstract? Indeed, every 40 seconds, a heart attack occurs, and a heart attack fatality occurs about every minute. For long, medical science has established that frequent monitoring of heart rate and blood pressure is the key to mitigating significant risks for stroke, heart failure and coronary artery disease. Current gold-standard vital sign monitoring devices are invasive, cause discomfort and interfere with users’ activities. We challenge this status quo and ask – can your next earable be the secret weapon to manage your cardiovascular health? We aren’t talking PopSci here, but the remarkable capabilities of a sensory earable – ushering a new pathway to a healthy heart. However, ensuring the accuracy and robustness of in-ear vital sign measurements is the most complex challenge in this vision. This lecturer will reflect on the algorithms and their systematic characterisations to address this challenge in continuously measuring the five most critical vital signs in our ear – Heart Rate (and Heart Rate Variability), SPO2 , Respiration Rate, Temperature and Blood Pressure.

Biography: Fahim Kawsar leads Pervasive Systems research at Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge and holds a Mobile Systems Professorship in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. He studies forms and intelligence of multi-sensory devices to learn, infer and augment human behaviour. Fahim is a Nokia Bell Labs Fellow.