In 1996, CoDebris was awarded a $98,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I grant from the National Institues of Health for EEG interpretive software. In 1997, CoDebris was awarded a $96,000 Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) design contract from NASA Johnson Space Center for development of a highly portable human physiology monitoring system, the BioVest. BioVest includes signal acquisition hardware/software, analysis software, and calibration devices. The system is optimized for recording and interpreting sleep parameters and measures of sleep deprivation in a configuration designed for multi-channel studies. Any biopotential or transducer source is accepted. Signals collected from applied electrodes and driven transducers are conditioned in a portable, light-weight, battery-powered, fiber-optic or wireless infrared Isolated Biomedical Information Transmitter worn on the subject, assuring isolation from electromagnetic interference and primary (line) electrical power. Received data is synchronized and archived in the Sleep Acquisition & Analysis Station, where conventional time and frequency domain algorithms are supplanted by recently developed wave-form extraction techniques to identify sleep spindles, K-complexes and other characteristic signatures. The algorithms are capable of identifying characteristic waveforms from electrocardiogram data as well. A Calibration Controller Network provides continuous calibration and monitoring of system performance, and provides an external local area network interface to other systems. Though not inexpensive, an additional, low-light or infrared imaging camera system should be integrated with the data stream for overall body position and movement. In 1998, CoDebris was awarded a $736,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant (5R44 HD34718-03) from the NIH for development of adaptive, configurable human physiology event detection softawre. There are well over a hundred distinct criteria to apply to even a standard staging analysis, all of which should be placed under some form of direct or indirect user control. A primary goal in pursuing the NIH project is to make the software adaptive to non-standard research needs. When the analyst changes a decision made by the program, it should be able to apply the criteria necessary to accomplish that change to all new data subjected to the changed analysis configuration, which may be saved to a named script file for certain classes of studies or to suit the needs of an individual analyst. An example might be the inclusion of data representing time-varying body temperature. The program will "interview" the analyst to determine criteria for assessing the data (voltage thresholds, frequency bands of interest, discrete waveform "events"), or the analyst might re-arrange existing criteria in a graphical decision tree. This can also be accomplished (but much more awkwardly) by allowing the analyst to modify individual decision parameters in Windows numeric "dialogs". New plug-in software development tools to accomplish these tasks are just now coming onto the market and will form a significant part of our project.
