Health

16 HE ALTH • Summer 2022 By Alan R. Earls W orcester Polytechnic Institute's Integrated Circuits and System Lab and its director, Ulkuhan Guler, are probing the leading edge of new means to enhance medical care and wellness through microelectronics. Most recently, she and her team developed a wireless blood oxygen detector targeted at neonatal care. For Guler, whose son was born premature and faced a lengthy hospitalization, it's personal. Making hospital-grade instrumentation to travel unobtrusively with a child could permit at-home monitoring, reducing hospital stays. Babies are healthier when they can be with their own family, Guler said. So, the goal of her device is to give doctors the f lexibility to monitor a patient with equal fidelity, whether they are in a hospital or at home. And it's not just infants. Adults with asthma or COPD can easily end up hospitalized if they or their caregivers are not alerted to decreasing lung function, something that accurate oxygen Ulkuhan Guler's research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute seeks to make the latest advancements in technology a routine part of health care PHOTOS | COURTESY OF WPI Ulkuhan Guler (center, in white), with WPI students, leads several research projects using microelectronics to monitor health conditions. Medical microelectronics monitoring can help to identify. "Although our O2 sensor can be also used by adults, we chose the population of babies, as they are the most vulnerable population. Moreover, the chair of the pediatrics department at [UMass Medical School] is interested in our project and willing to test our prototype at his clinic," said Guler. That's Dr. Lawrence Rhein, chair of the Guler (standing) is the director of the WPI Integrated Circuits and System Lab.

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