Ljilja Kascak, a master’s student in the School of Industrial Design, has been awarded first place in the “connected life” category of the Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) for a project called Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), a home-based monitoring application designed to help patients with chronic conditions. The competition, sponsored by the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (RNOC), is an annual student event that focuses on innovation in the areas of converged services, media, networks, and client and server platforms and environments.

For the past year Kascak has been researching remote patient monitoring devices, the topic of her master’s thesis. Under the supervision of assistant professor Claudia Rebola she has been designing and developing improved mobile information architectures for telehealth applications. She and teammates Michael Zeitz and Rahul Agrawal prototyped RPM as part of a class on mobile applications and services.

RPM is highly customizable by the user, and aims to reduce hospitalization costs and the frequency of hospital admissions, as well as increasing accessibility of interventions. While there are products on the market that allow patients to collect and store their data, they often use proprietary hardware. RPM is different and unique in that it can be used on any mobile or tablet device. It has the ability to:

• Record a daily journal using a short survey of health-related questions,
• Record blood pressure, using a separate blood pressure monitor,
• Alert 911 in case of emergency, and
• Monitor data on the web for use in the doctor’s office.

“I am so proud of Ljilja and her team,” said Rebola, Assistant Professor of industrial design, and Kascak’s advisor. “The CIC is highly competitive, winning it is an extraordinary accomplishment. RPM is the kind of product that will have a positive impact on so many people – I look forward to watching it take off.”

For more information on the CIC and RPM, visit http://cic.gatech.edu/drupal/springcic.