Professors Steve Warren, Punit Prakash, David Thompson, and Bala Natarajan are creating nighttime tools to monitor disabled children with health issues that include seizures. This work was featured in a segment on Fox News October 23.
Kansas State University (Manhattan, KS) and Heartspring (Wichita, KS) are working together to develop and evaluate a toolset to track the well-being of children with disabilities around the clock, offering clinicians and caregivers better means to assess and therefore accelerate the development of these children during their early years. The centerpiece of this toolset will be a sensor-laden bed that will gather multiple types of nighttime physiological and environmental data from a child without their knowledge. These data will then be aggregated into sleep-quality metrics that can be compared against daytime well-being and development parameters consistent with the child’s individualized education plan. Anyone that works with disabled children will affirm that a positive change in their life leads to emotional, physical, and financial relief for their extended families and caregivers. This effort offers the potential for accelerated development during a time in a severely disabled child’s life when the resulting life-long benefits for their family and community are the greatest in terms of quality of life and cost savings.