Jun Young (Daniel) Oh

A wearable lie detector? – well, somebody had to build it! Our paper, titled ‘Wireless, skin-interfaced multimodal sensing system for continuous psychophysiological monitoring—A wearable polygraph device,’ published in Science Advances (science.org/doi/10.1126/scia…), and highlighted in this press release from @NorthwesternU (news.northwestern.edu/storie…), introduces a device capable of precisely measuring the full suite of parameters (and beyond!) captured by state-of-the-art polygraph systems, but in a soft, wireless wearable form that mounts on the chest. Our emphasis is not on lies specifically, but instead on stress in general, and particularly for its relevance to medical care, as demonstrated in various representative cases – from pain experienced by infants, to sleep disruptions in babies with Down syndrome, to confusion in adults with hearing impairments, to strains experienced by medical students in training for emergency room care. The devices leverage the concepts of hybrid soft electronics for continuous measurements of body sounds, body movements, skin impedance, temperature and thermal transport. The results yield heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, variability and depth, sweat gland activation, cardiac amplitude (as a rough surrogate for blood pressure), near-surface blood flow and skin temperature. Machine learning algorithms rely on these data streams to determine stress. The paper presents not only a broad range of uses, as mentioned above, but also validations – from correlations to commercial polygraph instruments, to tools for pupillometry, to nurse scoring sheets, to polysomnography systems. Fun project, with many additional applications in sports, worker safety, etc – complementing previously published work from our group and impressive papers from others that consider stress biomarkers in sweat, but without the cumbersome process of collecting and chemically analyzing this class of biofluid. In fact, the platform introduced here involves only biophysical sensors, bypassing the need for disposable components and avoiding the various confounds (hysteresis, drift, lack of specificity, inadequate sensitivity and others) associated with biochemical measurements. Thanks to former postdoctoral fellows in the group – Prof. Sun Hong Kim (University of Seoul), Prof. Jaeyoung Yoo (SKKU), Prof. Tianyu Yang (ASU), Prof. Seonggwang Yoo (Inje University) and Dr. Seunghee Cho (Samsung) – for their leadership and to many current group members – Dr. Taewan Park and others -- for their contributions. Also grateful to our collaborators across the medical school, specifically Prof. Debbie Weese-Mayer, Dr. Khaytin Ilya and Dr. Jana Jaffe, and in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Finally, thanks to @amanda_mo for the nice writeup and press package for the Northwestern release.