SeismicPatch: An AI-Enabled Wearable Mechano-Acoustic Patch for Continuous Monitoring of Respiratory Conditions
ABSTRACT
SeismicPatch is an AI-enabled wearable device for continuous, non-invasive monitoring of respiratory conditions such as asthma and COPD. At its core is a tri-axial, high-bandwidth accelerometer achieving micro-g resolution beyond what conventional MEMS inertial sensors — optimized for motion tracking, not precision mechano-acoustic sensing — can provide, enabling capture of subtle lung vibrations such as wheezes and crackles. A machine learning pipeline classifies these signals in real time, enabling continuous respiratory monitoring outside clinical settings. In a 52-patient clinical study, SeismicPatch-based classification achieved 94.5% wheeze-detection accuracy, outperforming a digital stethoscope benchmark (89.0%). The talk will describe the sensor and packaging design underlying SeismicPatch, the clinical validation results, and advances to extend the application of this technology towards vascular sensing.
BIOGRAPHY
Farrokh Ayazi is the Regents Entrepreneur and Ken Byers Professor in Microsystems at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA. He is also the founder and managing director of StethX Microsystems, a spin-out of his research laboratory that commercializes wearable seismic patches for cardiopulmonary applications. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1997 and 2000, respectively, all in electrical engineering. His main research interests lie in the area of integrated micro/nano-electro-mechanical-systems, with a focus on acoustic resonators and inertial sensors. He was Founder and CTO of Qualtre, another spin-out of his research laboratory that commercialized bulk acoustic-wave silicon gyroscopes for navigation applications, which was acquired by Panasonic in 2016. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the national academy of inventors (NAI), holds 70 issued patents, and has authored over 300 refereed technical and scientific articles. Dr. Ayazi was the General Chair of the IEEE Micro-Electro-Mechanical- Systems Conference in 2014, San Francisco, CA, USA.