Under (Intraocular) Pressure

Civil & Environmental, Electrical & Computer

PITTSBURGH (Sept. 22, 2020) — Diabetic patients monitor their blood glucose throughout the day, watching for peaks and valleys. Just taking a sample once during a visit to the doctor’s office would not give a clear picture of whether the patient’s diabetes is under control. The same is true of glaucoma patients, whose intraocular pressure (IOP), or pressure within the eye, is too high. IOP varies throughout the day, but there isn’t yet an easy way to monitor changes at home that would provide proven, reliable readings, making it difficult for doctors to monitor the effectiveness of treatment. Piervincenzo Rizzo, PhD, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, is leading a project that will help glaucoma patients monitor their intraocular pressure (IOP) at home, giving them and their doctors a clearer picture of eye health. The project recently received $1,099,984 from the National Science Foundation. The proposed device would use a cylinder containing an array of particles that, when pressed against the closed eyelid, will send an acoustic wave into the eye and wait for it to bounce back. The properties of the returning wave give the device information about the pressure inside the eye. “We’re proposing to use a special family of acoustic waves that can interact with the eye, bouncing back like an echo,” said Rizzo. “It’s like shouting into a small room versus a large one. The properties of the echo depend on the properties of the room.” Rizzo’s team includes Sam Dickerson, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Swanson School, and Ian Sigal, PhD, Ian Conner, MD, PhD, and Robert Handzel, MD, in Pitt’s Department of Ophthalmology. “We understand that intraocular pressure can have a pretty wide range throughout the day, but have very few ways to assess this critical variable outside of the clinic,” explained Conner, Director of UPMC’s Glaucoma Service. “This technology really has a lot of potential to enable non-clinicians, and even patients themselves, to reliably assess intraocular pressure, which will allow their doctors to better tailor their treatments. The project, titled “Managing Glaucoma in the Digital Age: A New Tonometer to Connect Patients to their Caregivers,” will begin Oct. 1, 2020 and last four years.
Maggie Pavlick

Following the Current From Idea to Reality

Electrical & Computer

In March 2013, representatives from Mitsubishi Electric Company arrived from Japan to meet with University of Pittsburgh electrical engineers with a proposal: they wanted to engineer a way to identify faults within the new high voltage direct current (HVDC) system they intended to manufacture in forthcoming years. Fault identification is critical as high short circuit currents will cause equipment damage, and they needed a group of experts to propose and provide evidence that novel ideas would work as planned. The Pitt researchers—led by Founding Director of the Energy GRID Institute and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Greg Reed; Assistant Professor, Associate Director of the Pitt Energy GRID Institute, and Eaton Faculty Fellow Brandon Grainger; and ECE then-graduate student researchers Patrick Lewis and Hashim Al Hassan—were tasked with verifying power converter performance for a US market; validating the fault finding methods for Mitsubishi; and helping to take their innovation a step farther. Now, seven years later, the company announced that this technology is finally going to market with its Voltage Source Converter (VSC)-based HVDC-Diamond. The HVDC system is a utility-scale, power electronics system used to transmit megawatts of power from point to point, converting the alternating current (AC) produced by renewable energy sources, converting it to a direct current (DC) to send through the system, and converting it back to AC on the other end. As more renewable resources find a place in the power grid, systems like this one can transmit the power quickly and reliably to load centers where it will be used. “Transmitting power through high voltage DC is important. By transmitting at a super high voltage (in this case, 500,000 Volts), current levels will drop, resulting in less losses in the overall electrical system. It’s more efficient,” explained Grainger. “But, in such a large, expensive system, things can go bad very quickly if currents flow somewhere they shouldn’t. Our main tasks were to engineer a creative way to find faults in the system and to make sure the system was designed to meet the U.S. market with the help of local engineers at Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc. in Warrendale, PA.” Faults, or short-circuits, happen when equipment degrades and allows a current to flow somewhere other than the intended path. The new system would find faults within different segments of the apparatus so they can be addressed before causing damage. With a $250,000 grant from Mitsubishi, the researchers set to work validating the findings and ensuring it would work as intended. The proposed solution did not require a communication method for the HVDC system that would allow it to relay information about faults from one end of the 1000 kilometer-long units; however, that approach was ultimately left out of the final product. Communication between station to station is important when designing equipment operating at high voltage and power. In 2016, the team at Pitt published a paper in IEEE, “Fault Section Identification Protection Algorithm for Modular Multilevel Converter-Based High Voltage DC With a Hybrid Transmission Corridor,” with their findings. Prior to publication, the team filed a patent for their technology which was awarded Aug. 4, 2020. Now, the system is being manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric Company, based in Tokyo, Japan. “It’s a long road for projects to go from concept to reality, but it’s always an exciting process to be a part of,” said Grainger. “We were glad to have the opportunity to work with one of the leaders in the HVDC space. Our experience is just one example of the many ways academia and industry work together to bring innovative ideas to the marketplace.”
Maggie Pavlick

Smartphones can tell when you’re drunk by analyzing your walk

Bioengineering, Electrical & Computer

Ervin Sejdic, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering with appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Bioengineering, recently coauthored a paper published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (JSAD) that investigates the use of smartphones to detect alcohol intoxication. The research uses a smartphone's sensors to measure the user's gait as they walk, and they were able to correctly determine when the person's blood alcohol concentration exceeded the legal limit 90 percent of the time. “Many of us use smartphones as a source of entertainment and an occasional source of information. However, these devices are packed with high-quality sensors, and it is in our best interests to explore these sensors to enhance our daily lives," said Sejdic. "A combination of sophisticated sensors and artificial intelligence tools such as machine learning will provide us great opportunities to develop solutions that otherwise were only accessible in research or clinical settings. Our newest paper is just one example how we can use smartphones for the benefit of general public. With the ongoing pandemic, I’m sure many more novel solutions will pop up that will drastically expand the use of smartphones beyond entertainment apps.” News release from JSAD republished with permission. ### Smartphones can tell when you’re drunk by analyzing your walk By Paul CandonPISCATAWAY, NJ – Your smartphone can tell when you’ve had too much to drink by detecting changes in the way you walk, according to a new study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.Having real-time information about alcohol intoxication could be important for helping people reduce alcohol consumption, preventing drinking and driving or alerting a sponsor for someone in treatment, according to lead researcher Brian Suffoletto, M.D., who was with the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when the research was conducted and is now with Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine.“We have powerful sensors we carry around with us wherever we go,” Suffoletto says. “We need to learn how to use them to best serve public health.”But for Suffoletto, this research is much more than academic. “I lost a close friend to a drinking and driving crash in college,” he says. “And as an emergency physician, I have taken care of scores of adults with injuries related to acute alcohol intoxication. Because of this, I have dedicated the past 10 years to testing digital interventions to prevent deaths and injury related to excessive alcohol consumption.”For the study, Suffoletto and colleagues recruited 22 adults ages 21 to 43. Volunteers came to a lab and received a mixed drink with enough vodka to produce a breath alcohol concentration of .20 percent. They had one hour to finish the alcohol.Then hourly for seven hours, participants had their breath alcohol concentration analyzed and performed a walking task. For this task, researchers placed a smartphone on each participant’s lower back, secured with an elastic belt. Participants walked a straight line for 10 steps, turned around, and walked back 10 steps.The smartphones measured acceleration and mediolateral (side to side), vertical (up and down) and anteroposterior (forward and backward) movements while the participants walked.About 90 percent of the time, the researchers were able to use changes in gait to identify when participants’ breath alcohol concentration exceeded .08 percent, the legal limit for driving in the United States.“This controlled lab study shows that our phones can be useful to identify ‘signatures’ of functional impairments related to alcohol,” Suffoletto says.Although placing the smartphone on the lower back does not reflect how people carry their cell phones in real life, the research group plans to conduct additional research while people carry phones in their hands and in their pockets.And although it was a small investigation, the researchers write that this is a “proof-of-concept study” that “provides a foundation for future research on using smartphones to remotely detect alcohol-related impairments.”“In 5 years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels,” Suffoletto says, “they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sexual encounters.”Going forward, Suffoletto and his colleagues plan to not only build on this research detecting real-world signatures of alcohol-related impairment but also identify the best communication and behavioral strategies to influence and support individuals during high-risk periods such as intoxication. ### Suffoletto, B., Dasgupta, P., Uymatiao, R., Huber, J., Flickinger, K., & Sejdic, E., (2020). A preliminary study using smartphone accelerometers to sense gait impairments due to alcohol intoxication. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 81, 505–510. doi:10.15288/jsad.2020.81.505 ### To arrange an interview with Brian Suffoletto, M.D., please contact Mandy Erickson at +650-245-8491 or merickso@stanford.edu. ### The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs is published by the Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. It is the oldest substance-related journal published in the United States. ### To learn about education and training opportunities for addiction counselors and others at the Rutgers Center of Alcohol & Substance Use Studies, please visit https://education.alcoholstudies.rutgers.edu/education-training.###The Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs considers this press release to be in the public domain. Editors may publish this press release in print or electronic form without legal restriction. Please include proper attribution and byline.
Maggie Pavlick