A proposal by a Carle Illinois College of Medicine student to use technology to rescue drivers who have a heart attack behind the wheel was among the student projects winning recognition at the American College of Physicians Illinois chapter’s scientific meeting on December 4, 2020.
Third-year Carle Illinois student Shahnoor Amin created a poster proposing a system to combine wearable health monitoring technology with the computer in a self-driving vehicle. A smart-watch app would detect when a driver is having a heart attack, and then relay the information to the computer in the driver’s car. Amin said the self-driving car’s computer could then safely re-route the patient to the nearest hospital, where EKG data would already be in the hands of a healthcare team.
Amin’s proposal took second place when presented in poster form at the American College of Physicians Illinois Scientific meeting. “The idea is to combine the continuous health monitoring abilities of wearable devices with the operation and GPS routing of motor vehicles in order to prevent cardiac-related deaths,” Amin said.
Amin said his background in engineering and his nearly lifelong fascination with cars converged with his medical studies to fuel his proposal. “I think there is a lot of untapped innovation at the intersection of cars and health, especially with the emergence of autonomous/self-driving motor vehicles and wearable health devices,” Amin said.
Amin credited Carle Illinois Professors Olivia Coiado, Kashif Ahmad, and James Kumar with helping him develop his proposal, which he hopes to fine-tune and enter into other competitions.
Carle Illinois student Matthew Lee took third place in the competition for a poster titled “A Familiar Pathology in an Unfamiliar Location: Case Report of Ovarian Teratoma in the Left Upper Quadrant.” Ovarian teratomas are germ cell tumors that most often occur in postmenopausal patients.
The posters were displayed virtually at the ACP Illinois Chapter regional scientific meeting, held on December 4, 2020.
Additionally, Dr. Srijan Valasapalli and Dr. Sanjivani Sathe of the Carle Foundation placed first and second respectively in the clinical vignette competition at the same scientific meeting.
See Shahnoor Amin’s full presentation here.