Prof. Ulkuhan Guler
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The world has been in combat with COVID- 19 since December 2019. Around the world, physicians have been documenting their experiences under the heavy siege of the pandemic, emphasizing the presence of silent hypoxia and hypoxemia. This deceptive side of COVID-19 leads to deficient levels of oxygen even in patients who appear to be breathing normally. Under normal conditions, these levels of oxygen are far below those that cause death. As in the COVID-19 example, respiratory failure is unpredictable in nature and can become life-threatening in a matter of minutes. Changes in vital sign parameters often reveal important markers of the onset of a deterioration in health. Quantifying the real-time dynamics and physiological distributions of blood gas measurements of CO2 and O2 and other respiratory parameters are imperative to both clinicians and researchers. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to have the ability to sense and measure respiratory parameters in a continuous, reliable, and accurate manner across different conditions. Remote and continuous monitoring of respiratory parameters with a miniaturized, noninvasive, and comfortable device is essential, not only for known respiratory diseases, including COPD and sleep apnea in adults and babies, but for uprising diseases as COVID-19. The talk covers emerging devices for respiration parameters monitoring, transforming bulky benchtop instruments into miniaturized, next-generation medical IoT devices. The talk also explores currently available technologies, with a short glance back to the evolution of respiratory parameter sensing systems.
Ulkuhan Guler is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), MA, USA. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, GA, USA. She received the B.Sc. degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from the Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, the M.E degree, in Electronics Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, and the Ph.D. degree in Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is the founding director of the Integrated Circuits and Systems (ICAS) Lab at WPI. Her research interests lie in the broad area of circuits and systems, and her primary area of interest is analog/mixed-signal integrated circuits. More specifically, she is interested in the circuit design of sensing interfaces, bioelectronics, energy harvesting and wireless power transmission systems, and security for applications in healthcare. The research question which she focused recently is how electronic interfaces can be engineered along with biosensors to facilitate novel wireless wearable and implantable sensors that measure physiological parameters from the human body. She is the recipient of the 2020 outstanding presentation award sponsored by the Interstellar Initiative, an organization jointly presented by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development and the New York Academy of Sciences. Dr. Guler is a senior member of IEEE and serves as a reviewer and committee member in various societies including Circuits and Systems, Biomedical Circuits and Systems, and Solid-State Circuits.
