Portable sensing and imaging : towards Portable Healthcare

Advances in medicine and technology are opening a new era of portable healthcare. Together with health apps, wearable/portable health monitoring systems are targeting medical diagnosis or health and wellness. The development of Wearable Health Monitoring Systems (WHMS) has been motivated mainly by increasing healthcare costs and by an aging world population. Optical techniques are widely used in clinical settings and in biomedical research to interrogate bio-molecular interactions and to evaluate tissue dynamics. Miniature integrated optical systems for sensing and imaging can be portable, enabling long-term imaging studies in living tissues.  Fluorescent dyes are frequently used to mark biological samples, and track tissues, cells and individual molecules. In the lab, fluorescence is used to understand physiology and develop new cures to common diseases. In the clinic, fluorescence is used to diagnose health conditions and to evaluate treatments. Translating fluorescence imaging to portable healthcare systems will help us take better care of ourselves.

This seminar will review fundamental properties of fluorescence, tissue absorption and scattering and show how these can be used to track vital signs and provide wellness indicators during a physical activity. We will review examples of portable imaging systems in rapid disease diagnosis, and in health monitoring.

Biography

Dr. Ofer Levi is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, currently on a Sabbatical leave at Stanford University. Dr. Levi received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel in 2000, and worked in 2000-2007 as a Postdoctoral Fellow and as a Research Associate at the Departments of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, CA.  He serves as an Associate Editor in Biomedical Optics Express (OSA) and is a member of OSA, IEEE-Photonics, and SPIE.  His recent research areas include biomedical imaging systems and optical bio-sensors based on semiconductor devices and nano-structures, and their application to bio-medical diagnostics, in vivo imaging, and study of bio-molecular interactions.  More details can be found at http://biophotonics.utoronto.ca/