A teenager from Kitchener, Ont., has received the top award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair.
<p Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the title of Gurnoor Kaur's project, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Height Collegiate Institute in Kitchener.
The judges at the Edmonton event praised the 17-year-old’s work for addressing a problem in blood oxygen sensors that has persisted for 35 years, contributing to higher mortality rates among Black patients.
Kaur spoke with CBC K-W’s The Morning Edition prior to her trip to Edmonton about another device she designed to detect hospital-induced delirium, which can impact patients’ cognitive abilities.
She pointed out that nurses often have too much on their plates, leading many cases of delirium to go unnoticed.
“It can detect emotions and micro expressions to understand patients’ emotional state and it also can detect heart rate and respiratory rate through non-contact, camera-based monitoring, eliminating the need for bulky sensors in hospitals as well,” she said.
“I’ve integrated a chatbot to be able to continuously converse with patients and run reorientation techniques, which have been shown to decrease risk by up to 50 per cent.”
WATCH | Gurnoor Kaur explains her hospital delirium device:
Kitchener teen creates device that could help treat hospital delirium
Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student from Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, has developed a device aimed at identifying and treating hospital-induced delirium-a sudden confusion or disorientation that some individuals experience during acute care. She came up with this idea after visiting her father in the hospital. The 17-year-old will showcase her invention when she attends the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Edmonton this weekend.
The research she conducted on blood oxygen sensors ties into this project. She discovered that systems monitoring vital signs often show demographic bias.
“So on lighter skin patients, the error is lower than it is on darker skin patients,” she said.
“Currently, the field assumes that it’s an issue with the data that the models are being trained on, not enough diverse data, and that they don’t have enough videos from darker skinned patients,” she said.
“While that does contribute to the issue, I also found out that there is a mathematical instability in current cardiac models and to be able to resolve that you need to add a missing term and that’s what my project focused on. So this is an aspect of the hospital induced delirium project. But what I did was I solved the mathematical instability in cardiac model and using that I was able to start removing this demographic bias.”
Kaur told CBC K-W she’s definitely interested in entering medical fields for her future career as “interest currently is computational biophysics.”
“I want to use math and physics to be able to model our biological systems and understand how light interacts with them so we can create better diagnosis tools and treatments that eliminate biases currently found in health care,” she said.
LISTEN | Gurnoor Kaur talks about her research projects:
The Morning Edition – K-W7:28Grade 11 student develops monitoring system to help curb hospital delirium
A teenager from Kitchener is gaining national attention for an idea sparked during a visit with her dad at the hospital. Gurnoor Kaur, who studies in Grade 11 at Cameron Heights, discusses winning the National Ingenious Plus award for her work identifying symptoms related to hospital delirium.
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Kitchener teen creates device that could help treat hospital delirium
Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student from Cameron Heights Collegiate Institute in Kitchener, has developed a device aimed at identifying and treating hospital-induced delirium-a sudden confusion or disorientation that some individuals experience during acute care. She came up with this idea after visiting her father in the hospital. The 17-year-old will showcase her invention when she attends the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Edmonton this weekend.
The research she conducted on blood oxygen sensors ties into this project. She discovered that systems monitoring vital signs often show demographic bias.
“So on lighter skin patients, the error is lower than it is on darker skin patients,” she said.
“Currently, the field assumes that it’s an issue with the data that the models are being trained on, not enough diverse data, and that they don’t have enough videos from darker skinned patients,” she said.
“While that does contribute to the issue, I also found out that there is a mathematical instability in current cardiac models and to be able to resolve that you need to add a missing term and that’s what my project focused on. So this is an aspect of the hospital induced delirium project. But what I did was I solved the mathematical instability in cardiac model and using that I was able to start removing this demographic bias.”
Kaur told CBC K-W she’s definitely interested in entering medical fields for her future career as “interest currently is computational biophysics.”
“I want to use math and physics to be able to model our biological systems and understand how light interacts with them so we can create better diagnosis tools and treatments that eliminate biases currently found in health care,” she said.
LISTEN | Gurnoor Kaur talks about her research projects:
The Morning Edition – K-W7:28Grade 11 student develops monitoring system to help curb hospital delirium
A teenager from Kitchener is gaining national attention for an idea sparked during a visit with her dad at the hospital. Gurnoor Kaur, who studies in Grade 11 at Cameron Heights, discusses winning the National Ingenious Plus award for her work identifying symptoms related to hospital delirium.Source link
