At the group meeting on 13th January Dr David Harris-Birtill gave a talk about ongoing work creating an automated remote pulse oximeter.

Here’s an abstract about this work which was presented at a recent conference in India:

“A patient’s blood oxygen saturation and heart rate are crucial indicators for monitoring their wellbeing; standard practice is to use a finger clip pulse oximeter, creating practical constraints on when and how these measurements are taken. Using multispectral imaging cameras, oxygen saturation and heart rate can be measured remotely, and without contact sensors. However, these devices are both expensive and lack the ability to accurately locate the body within the image. This project addresses these problems, creating and testing a prototype for a reliable, low cost system using a widely available camera normally used to control a gaming device, providing both colour and co-registered infrared images. The camera images are then used for remote sensing of oxygen saturation and heart rate for up to six people simultaneously.
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Michael Pitcher will be presenting to the School of Medicine’s Infection Group next Thursday. The talk will be a Journal Club meeting, where he will be discussing the following article from the Lancet Infectious Diseases:

P. T. Elkington and J. S. Friedland, “Permutations of time and place in tuberculosis,” Lancet Infect. Dis., vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 1357–1360, 2015..

The Personal View piece discusses the need for a new interpretation of the life cycle of Tuberculosis with reference to both the timescales of infection and the localisation within the lung of varying stages of the infection.

The meeting is at 10:00am Thursday 26th January in Seminar Room 1, School of Medicine.