LA Children's Hospital Fighting Disease With Tiny Robots, Big Data

If you are a small-scale kid at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, nigh to receive chemotherapy drugs intravenously, IVEY might be at your bedside to distract and soothe you.

IVEY is not a nurse or doctor, but a small, 3D-printed robot—just 13.5 inches alpine—named for the 4 procedures it helps young patients suffer.

Based on the open up-source Hello-Robo MAKI model, IVEY was adapted for CHLA in collaboration with Maja Mataric, PhD, head of USC's Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center. It has half-dozen Dynamixel Actuators, providing six degrees of freedom in its head—including two adorably big, Manga-style expressive eyes. IVEY is powered by Arduino IDE and congenital on ROS.

IVEY Robot "At that place's a lot of literature at present about how stressful and painful situations in childhood atomic number 82 to later trauma, and, as an developed, perhaps they'll avoid care, leading to bad health outcomes," pediatric hospitalist Margaret Trost, Dr., tells PCMag. "Nosotros know there's a lot of affinity for children with technology, and I'm a technology enthusiast mostly, working a lot with the Health, Technology and Engineering group at USC, so our work hither with IVEY is to examine how best to address this, while the pediatric patient is in a infirmary setting."

During a demo in Dr. Trost's part at CHLA, IVEY's sugariness phonation gently guided united states to indicate our pain levels on a tablet, get through animate exercises, and—through a series of game-style, on-screen visuals—grasp what's near to happen. IVEY was clear, helpful and, quite frankly, enchanting.

"IVEY is part of a clinical study here at CHLA with the Child Life Program to place the nigh effective advice with patients," said Dr. Trost, who is also an assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. "Nosotros're comparing IVEY equally a scripted 'buddy' [who distracts] patients with general conversational topics, versus IVEY...every bit a helper, using more than compassionate language, and, finally, comparing reduction in feet when working with the homo Kid Life specialist, merely no IVEY."

Founded in 1901, CHLA officially opened a year later in a trivial firm in what is now Los Angeles'south Chinatown neighborhood. There were just fourteen patients, surgery was carried out in the former pantry expanse, and a md did firm-calls on horseback.

In 1932, information technology became affiliated with the Keck School, and CHLA has since embraced emerging technologies, from limb implants to avert amputation in 1990 to gene therapy on newborns with severe immune deficiencies (aka chimera baby disease) in 1993.

Family unit Fitbit Challenge

Today, CHLA is tackling things like babyhood obesity using wearables as part of clinical trials headed up by Juan Espinoza, MD, an attention physician at CHLA.

"In our piece of work with pediatric obesity we don't utilise pharmacological intervention for children," Dr. Espinoza told PCMag. "Instead, we apply Fitbits, not so much to track activity, but because we recall they enhance our structured multidisciplinary eight-week program. We also believe in a family unit-centered solution, because you accept to appoint parents, in the form of a support group, and through education around nutrition. So they wear Fitbits as well."

The idea is that Fitbit data doesn't lie, unlike self-reporting food diaries and activeness journals of the past.

"That's the beauty of engineering science similar wearables," Dr. Espinoza confirmed. "Because now we have the data to capture, verify, analyze and then advise new hypotheses and test those in a virtuous circumvolve."

Fitbit Charge 2

The children's information is safeguarded, every bit required past the Children's Online Privacy Protection Human activity (COPPA), but Dr. Espinoza, who is as well an assistant professor of Pediatrics at Keck, has seen improvement amongst those wearing the gadgets.

Since the program started in 2022, CHLA has enrolled 132 families, evenly distributed between those wearing Fitbits and those not, and 84 per centum of those who wore Fitbits saw a fifty percent improvement over the non-wearables group. "Information technology works," according to Dr. Espinoza.

He'southward hoping these wearables can be used for some of the trickier aspects of working with young patients. "In pediatrics, 1 of the things nosotros worry most is unnecessary or painful interventions. It's hard to restrain a 3-year-old to have blood samples and you lot experience like a terrible person afterwards.

"We already utilize light assimilation and refraction to non-invasively measure things like blood oxygen levels. Now there are several manufacturers looking at using similar technologies to rail changes in other molecules. A wearable that could rail these markers, like renal and liver function, would be great, and far less invasive than our current approach for pediatric patients."

Using AI to Care for the Sickest Patients

There were lots of clinical trials we could have seen during our visit; CHLA has an entire program dedicated to innovation. Simply we closed out our tour with Randall Wetzel, Chairman of CHLA's Department of Anesthesiology Critical Intendance Medicine. He created the Laura P. and Leland M. Whittier Virtual Pediatric Intensive Intendance Unit of measurement (vPICU), a state-of-the-art machine that'due south learning to optimize care for critically ill children.

"I desire to measure everything: because the real evidence comes from the electronic health records and flowing off the monitors in the ICU," explained Dr. Wetzel.

"We're capturing everything and analyzing it within neural networks inside our virtual ICU (vPICU). It'south a vital prognostic tool and nosotros've now developed a lot of avant-garde algorithms to assess critical intendance therapies and outcomes. We have over 100 data streams coming off each bedside, with an boilerplate of xx beds per ICU, including drug interactions, test results, interventional settings, IVs, intracranial pressures from head traumas, and now we can understand the simultaneous events as they happen."

All this A.I. deep learning takes an enormous amount of processing power; CHLA uses GeForce Titan X GPU and is an Nvidia data science case report.

The vPICU connects with other medical institutions and inquiry facilities to populate databases and extend telemedicine networks across the globe. CHLA is inviting information scientists and researchers to bring together every bit fellows, to extrapolate new studies, based on the vPICU data, extending its attain into underserved communities and rural areas.

"We've giving physicians, at the kid's bedside, the benefit of the all-time data at their fingertips," stressed Dr. Wetzel, who is also professor of Pediatrics and Anesthesiology at Keck. "Information that is entirely current—non from medical journals, or anecdotal show, or professorial laissez passer-on. We know the corporeality of noesis has surpassed our power to retain it. We need a cognitive assist, a medical prosthesis, if y'all like—and that's what we're edifice here with the vPICU."