Soft, wearable system offers continuous wireless monitoring of newborns’ health.

A new, soft, all-in-one, wearable system has been designed for continuous wireless monitoring of neonatal health in low-resource settings. Developed by Georgia Tech researchers using advanced packaging technologies, the system features a chest-mounted patch and a forehead-mounted pulse oximeter that transmits real-time data to a smartphone app. 

The wearable device measures and records important clinical parameters such as heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, electrocardiograms, and blood oxygen saturation. Speedy detection of abnormal readings in resource-challenged neonatal units could significantly reduce newborn mortality rates.

The device’s pilot study, conducted at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital (TASH) in Addis Ababa, in collaboration with Abebaw Fekadu, Ph.D., from the Centre for Innovative Drug Development and Therapeutic Trials for Africa (CDT Africa Inc.), and neonatologist Asrat Demtse, M.D., from the TASH department of pediatrics, demonstrated a significant improvement over current vital sign monitoring and recording methods by providing continuous oversight using less medical equipment while also reducing handwritten paper tracking. Vital signs are a group of the most crucial medical data that indicate the status of the body's life-sustaining functions. The pairing of this wearable system with a smartphone app automated the monitoring process and delivered a superior level of neonatal care compared to the current processes at Ethiopia’s best hospital. 

Medical staff and parents also observed a reduced need to wake their babies when using the wearable monitoring system. In addition, after participating in the study, 84% of Ethiopian parents said they would use the device at home.

“Professor Hong Yeo and I connected immediately after he gave a brief research talk about a new, wearable cardiac monitor for children,” said Rudy Gleason. “I asked him if we could co-develop a wearable device for newborn babies in Ethiopia that measured not one, but a variety of vital signs. We both thought it was a great idea.”

Yeo and Gleason are faculty members in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. And both are affiliated with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology, which seeks to improve global health.

In 2009, Gleason and his wife were in the process of adopting a baby from Ethiopia named Kennedy. Before they could bring her home, however, she died — the result, Gleason said, of a seemingly preventable combination of malnutrition and diarrhea.

“This loss redirected my academic teaching, research, and service activities at Georgia Tech,” said Gleason. “Since then, I’ve spent most of my career focused on developing resource-appropriate biomedical devices to reduce maternal and child mortality.”

“When we started this latest study, Ethiopian parents were reluctant to participate. But once we recruited a few mothers in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), everyone in the NICU community wanted their child to participate in our wearable health monitoring system.”

According to Yeo, “We designed the wearable patch as a safe, clinical-grade solution with minimal skin irritation. Its key design advantage lies in the use of nanomembranes, which allows the device to be soft and highly conformal to the baby's skin. Wearing the device helps to ensure critical events are not missed since the built-in automation acts as a force multiplier, freeing clinical staff to focus more on complex decision-making rather than manual data acquisition.”

“Rudy has a deep love for the people of Ethiopia. I feel fortunate to have met him as we embark on this project aimed at helping sick babies in the country. Without his support, I could not envision bringing this technology to Ethiopia,” said Yeo.

During the past decade, child mortality rates have decreased in Ethiopia, but newborn deaths have remained mostly unchanged. Both Yeo and Gleason feel their new wearable neonatal device could significantly lower mortality rates for newborns in Ethiopia as they advance this research. 

 

Citation: Zhou, L., Joseph, M., Lee, Y.J. et al. Soft, all-in-one, nanomembrane wearable system for advancing neonatal health monitoring in Ethiopia. npj Digit. Med. 8, 575 (2025).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-025-01974-8

Funding: Gates Foundation (INV-006189) and the National Institutes of Health (R01HD100635). This work was also supported by the Imlay Foundation—Innovation Fund.

 

 

Viral videos abound with humanoid robots performing amazing feats of acrobatics and dance but finding videos of a humanoid robot performing a common household task or traversing a new multi-terrain environment easily, and without human control, are much rarer. This is because training humanoid robots to perform these seemingly simple functions involves the need for simulation training data that lack the complex dynamics and degrees of freedom of motion that are inherent in humanoid robots. 

To achieve better training outcomes with faster deployment results, Fukang Liu and Feiyang Wu, graduate students under Professor Ye Zhao from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and faculty member of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, have published a duo of papers in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. This is a collaborative work with three other IRIM affiliated faculties, Profs. Danfei Xu, Yue Chen, and Sehoon Ha, as well as Prof. Anqi Wu from School of Computational Science and Engineering.

To develop more reliable motion learning for humanoid robots and enable humanoid robots to perform complex whole-body movements in the real world, Fukang led a team and developed Opt2Skill, a hybrid robot learning framework that combines model-based trajectory optimization with reinforcement learning.  Their framework integrates dynamics and contacts into the trajectory planning process and generates high-quality, dynamically feasible datasets, which result in more reliable motion learning for humanoid robots and improved position tracking and task success rates. This approach shows a promising way to augment the performance and generalization of humanoid RL policies using dynamically feasible motion datasets. Incorporating torque data also improved motion stability and force tracking in contact-rich scenarios, demonstrating that torque information plays a key role in learning physically consistent and contact-rich humanoid behaviors.

While other datasets, such as inverse kinematics or human demonstrations, are valuable, they don’t always capture the dynamics needed for reliable whole-body humanoid control.” said by Fukang Liu. “With our Opt2Skill framework, we combine trajectory optimization with reinforcement learning to generate and leverage high-quality, dynamically feasible motion data. This integrated approach gives robots a richer and more physically grounded training process, enabling them to learn these complex tasks more reliably and safely for real-world deployment. - Fukang Liu

In another line of humanoid research, Feiyang established a one-stage training framework that allows humanoid robots to learn locomotion more efficiently and with greater environmental adaptability. Their framework, Learn-to-Teach (L2T), unlike traditional two-stage “teacher-student” approaches, which first train an expert in simulation and then retrain a limited-perception student, teaches both simultaneously, sharing knowledge and experiences in real time. The result of this two-way training is a 50% reduction in training data and time, while maintaining or surpassing state-of-the-art performance in humanoid locomotion. The lightweight policy learned through this process enables the lab’s humanoid robot to traverse more than a dozen real-world terrains—grass, gravel, sand, stairs, and slopes—without retraining or depth sensors.

By training an expert and a deployable controller together, we can turn rich simulation feedback into a lightweight policy that runs on real hardware, letting our humanoid adapt to uneven, unstructured terrain with far less data and hand-tuning than traditional methods. - Feiyang Wu

By the application of these training processes, the team hopes to speed the development of deployable humanoid robots for home use, manufacturing, defense, and search and rescue assistance in dangerous environments. These methods also support advances in embodied intelligence, enabling robots to learn richer, more context-aware behaviors.Additionally, the training data process can be applied to research to improve the functionality and adaptability of human assistive devices for medical and therapeutic uses.

As humanoid robots move from controlled labs into messy, unpredictable real-world environments, the key is developing embodied intelligence—the ability for robots to sense, adapt, and act through their physical bodies,” said Professor Ye Zhao. “The innovations from our students push us closer to robots that can learn robust skills, navigate diverse terrains, and ultimately operate safely and reliably alongside people. - Prof. Ye Zhao

Author - Christa M. Ernst

Citations

Liu F, Gu Z, Cai Y, Zhou Z, Jung H, Jang J, Zhao S, Ha S, Chen Y, Xu D, Zhao Y. Opt2skill: Imitating dynamically-feasible whole-body trajectories for versatile humanoid loco-manipulation. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 2025 Oct 13.

Wu F, Nal X, Jang J, Zhu W, Gu Z, Wu A, Zhao Y. Learn to teach: Sample-efficient privileged learning for humanoid locomotion over real-world uneven terrain. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. 2025 Jul 23.
 

 

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311 chatbots make it easier for people to report issues to their local government without long wait times on the phone. However, a new study finds that the technology might inhibit civic engagement.

311 systems allow residents to report potholes, broken fire hydrants, and other municipal issues. In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide 311 services to community residents has boomed across city and state governments. This includes an artificial virtual assistant (AVA) developed by third-party vendors for the City of Atlanta in 2023.

Through survey data, researchers from Tech’s School of Interactive Computing found that many residents are generally positive about 311 chatbots. In addition to eliminating long wait times over the phone, they also offer residents quick answers to permit applications, waste collection, and other frequently asked questions.

However, the study, which was conducted in Atlanta, indicates that 311 chatbots could be causing residents to feel isolated from public officials and less aware of what’s happening in their community.

Jieyu Zhou, a Ph.D. student in the School of IC, said it doesn’t have to be that way.

Uniting Communities

Zhou and her advisor, Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan, published a paper at the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference that focuses on improving public service chatbot design and amplifying their civic impact. They collaborated with Professor Carl DiSalvo, Associate Professor Lynn Dombrowski, and graduate students Rui Shen and Yue You.

Zhou said 311 chatbots have the potential to be agents that drive community organization and improve quality of life.

“Current chatbots risk isolating users in their own experience,” Zhou said. “In the 311 system, people tend to report their own individual issues but lose a sense of what is happening in their broader community. 

“People are very positive about these tools, but I think there’s an opportunity as we envision what civic chatbots could be. It’s important for us to emphasize that social element — engaging people within the community and connecting them with government representatives, community organizers, and other community members.”

Zhou and MacLellan said 311 chatbots can leave users wondering if others in their communities share their concerns.

“If people are at a town hall meeting, they can get a sense of whether the problems they are experiencing are shared by others,” Zhou said. “We can’t do that with a chatbot. It’s like an isolated room, and we’re trying to open the doors and the windows.”

Adding a Human Touch

In their paper, the researchers note that one of the biggest criticisms of 311 chatbots is they can’t replace interpersonal interaction.

Unlike chatbots, people working in local government offices are likely to:

• Have direct knowledge of issues
• Provide appropriate referrals
• Empathize with the resident’s concerns

MacLellan said residents are likely to grow frustrated with a chatbot when reporting issues that require this level of contextual knowledge.

One person in the researchers’ survey noted that the chatbot they used didn’t understand that their report was about a sidewalk issue, not a street issue.

“Explaining such a situation to a human representative is straightforward,” MacLellan said. “However, when the issue being raised does not fall within any of the categories the chatbot is built to address, it often misinterprets the query and offers information that isn’t helpful.”

The researchers offer some design suggestions that can help chatbots foster community engagement and improve community well-being:

• Escalation. Regarding the sidewalk report, the chatbot did not offer a way to escalate the query to a human who could resolve it. Zhou said that this is a feature that chatbots should have but often lack.
• Transparency. Chatbots could provide details about recent and frequently reported community issues. They should inform users early in the call process about known problems to help avoid an overload of user complaints.
• Education. Chatbots can keep users updated about what’s happening in their communities.
• Collective action. Chatbots can help communities organize and gather ideas to address challenges and solve problems.

“Government agencies may focus mainly on fixing individual issues,” Zhou said, “But recognizing community-level patterns can inspire collective creativity. For example, one participant suggested that if many people report a broken swing at a playground, it could spark an initiative to design a new playground together—going far beyond just fixing it.”

These are just a few examples of things, the researchers argue, that 311 services were originally designed to achieve.

“Communities were already collaborating on identifying and reporting issues,” Zhou said. “These chatbots should reflect the original intentions and collaboration practices of the communities they serve.

“Our research suggests we can increase the positive impact of civic chatbots by including social aspects within the design of the system, connecting people, and building a community view.”

The second Wearable Health Equity Workshop was held on October 30, 2025, at the Georgia Tech Marcus Nanotechnology Building. The workshop presented some of the latest wearable health technologies and offered practical solutions for advancing rural healthcare.

The all-day workshop was sponsored by the Georgia Tech Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare Center (WISH Center), the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), and the Institute for Matter and Systems (IMS). 

Academic, clinical, and industry leaders gathered to learn about some of the most exciting wearable technologies and explore proven, practical solutions for improving health in underserved rural areas. Medical professionals from Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Albany, Georgia shared real-world solutions to providing more effective healthcare in their regional, rural areas.

The morning keynote speaker was Philipp Gutruf, Ph.D., an associate professor and associate department head of biomedical engineering at the University of Arizona. Gutruf’s research focuses on creating devices that intimately integrate with biological systems, developing wireless, battery-free, and fully implantable platforms for biosignal monitoring, neurostimulation, and biointerfaces.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Kimberlee McKay, M.D., with Avera Medical Group in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. McKay is a physician-leader in women’s health who has redefined how obstetrics and gynecology are delivered across rural and underserved communities. 

A technology panel moderated by Alexander Adams, Ph.D., assistant professor, in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech included:
* Andrea Braden, M.D., Founder & CEO of Lybbie and medical director of the Atlanta Birth Center
* Farrokh Ayazi, Ph.D., director of the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium, Regents Entrepreneur, and Ken Byers Professorship in Microsystems
* Rosa Arriaga, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at Georgia Tech
* Steve Xu, M.D., CEO Sibel Health, medical director at Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics Northwestern University was scheduled, but was unable to attend.

In the afternoon, a rural health panel was moderated by Rudolph Gleason, Ph.D., professor in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. 
Those panelists were:
* Shelly Spires, M.S.M., CEO Albany Area Primary Health Care, Inc.
* W. Brad Jones, Ph.D., CEO Life Well Promotions
* Ruwanthi Ekanayake, M.D./Ph.D. candidate, Emory University - Rollins School of Public Health and Emory School of Medicine

The best poster awards were won by postdoctoral research fellow Jimin Lee, Ph.D., and mechanical engineering doctoral student Garan Byun. The best rapid talk award winner was Ramy Ghanim, a doctoral student in chemical engineering.

Key faculty organizers of this year’s event included W. Hong Yeo, director of the WISH Center and professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Clint Zeagler, director of strategic partnerships in IPaT; Josh Lee, research program manager in the WISH Center; Alexander Adams, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; and Rudy Gleason, professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Heart failure remains one of the most challenging conditions to monitor outside the clinic. Patients may experience changes in symptoms, such as fatigue or shortness of breath, between visits, yet many current devices provide limited data, leaving physicians without continuous insight into heart function.

“Despite advances in digital health, continuous monitoring of the heart’s mechanical function has remained difficult outside clinical settings,” said Omer Inan, researcher and entrepreneur at Georgia Tech. “Patients and physicians have long needed a tool that provides deeper, real-time insights into heart performance without invasive procedures. We decided to tackle that problem head-on with a wearable device.”

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Maintaining balance while walking may seem automatic — until suddenly it isn’t. Gait impairment, or difficulty with walking, is a major liability for stroke and Parkinson’s patients.  Not only do gait issues slow a person down, but they are also one of the top causes of falls. And solutions are often limited to time-intensive and costly physical therapy.

A new wearable electronic device that can be inserted inside any shoe may be able to address this challenge. The device, developed by Georgia Tech researchers, is made of more than 170 thin, flexible sensors that measure foot pressure — a key metric for determining whether someone is off-balance. The sensor collects pressure data, which the researchers could eventually use to predict which changes lead to falls.

The researchers presented their work in the paper, “Flexible Smart Insole and Plantar Pressure Monitoring Using Screen-Printed Nanomaterials and Piezoresistive Sensors.” It was the cover paper in the August edition of ACSApplied Materials & Interfaces. 

Pressure Points

Smart footwear isn’t new — but making it both functional and affordable has been nearly impossible. W. Hong Yeo’s lab has made its reputation on creating malleable medical devices. The researchers rely on the common commercial practice of screen-printing electronics to screen-print sensors. They realized they could apply this printing technique to address walking difficulties.

“Screen-printing is advantageous for developing medical devices because it's low-cost and scalable,” said Yeo, the Peterson Professor and Harris Saunders Jr. Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “So, when it comes to thinking about commercialization and mass production, screen-printing is a really good platform because it's already been used in the electronics industry.”

Making the device accessible to the everyday user was paramount for Yeo’s team. A key innovation was making sure the wearable is thin enough to be comfortable for the wearer and easy to integrate with other assistive technologies. The device uses Bluetooth, enabling a smartphone to collect data and offer the future possibility of integrating with existing health monitoring applications.

Possibilities for real-world adaptation are promising, thanks to these innovations. Lightweight and small, the wearable could be paired with robotics devices to help stroke and Parkinson’s patients and the elderly walk. The high number of sensors could make it easier for researchers to apply a machine learning algorithm that could predict falls. The device could even enable professional athletes to analyze their performance.

Regardless of how the device is used, Yeo intends to keep its cost under $100. So far, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the researchers have tested the device on healthy subjects. They hope to expand the study to people with gait impairments and, eventually, make the device commercially available. 

“I'm trying to bridge the gap between the lack of available devices in hospitals or medical practices and the lab-scale devices,” Yeo said. “We want these devices to be ready now — not in 10 years.”

With its low-cost, wireless design and potential for real-time feedback, this smart insole could transform how we monitor and manage walking difficulties — not just in clinical settings, but in everyday life. 

Epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s disease — as a Jim Pope Fellow, Adam McCallum is dedicated to helping students search for solutions to these and other devastating diseases. McCallum is a translational research advocate in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, currently ranked No. 2 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. He hopes to accelerate the commercialization of the most promising biotech advances.  

When McCallum learned about the Jim Pope Fellowship, he saw it as a tremendous opportunity. “Biomedical engineering research has so much potential to be translated into products and solutions that tackle unmet clinical needs, that could be shaped to enhance society in general,” he says. “It’s a collaboration between biology, medicine, and engineering. The Pope Fellowship is a unique opportunity to explore new projects dedicated to entrepreneurship.” 

McCallum is one of five faculty members to receive the Jim Pope Fellowship, which supports faculty in becoming entrepreneurial instructors and mentors in CREATE-X. He hopes to leverage this fellowship to instill entrepreneurial confidence in biomedical engineering graduate students and faculty and help them translate their research into IP and healthcare-focused products to be used in and out of the clinic.

Since being named a fellow, McCallum has applied the funding to attend conferences to learn more about new methods for teaching commercialization and entrepreneurship, develop programming to enhance the student experience, increase student understanding and interest in entrepreneurship, and explore creative new projects he has envisioned while at Georgia Tech.

Establishing a New Commercialization Course

Beginning in the fall, he will teach a new course, Fundamentals of Biotechnology Commercialization, targeting BME graduate students. McCallum developed the curriculum, which begins with an overview of technology commercialization and the commercialization process, followed by modules on IP — how to protect one’s inventions; financing, with a focus on early-stage commercialization funding opportunities; and choosing a commercialization path.

“In the second part of the course, students will simulate a patent filing,” says McCallum. “It’s a really important step in the commercialization process. In future iterations of the course, I would love to have students file real disclosures and provisional patent applications with our Tech Transfer Office and have a licensing associate talk to them about managing the IP.”

BME Innovations Pivotal to Georgia Tech’s IP Ecosystem

McCallum sees Georgia Tech BME researchers as an important driver of innovation, and the Institute’s patent track record reflects their critical role: More than 21% of U.S.-issued patents to Georgia Tech have at least one BME inventor listed, according to the Office of Commercialization. 

In the past year, he has already seen the value of infusing an entrepreneurial spirit into his curriculum. Annabelle Singer (BME) and Levi Wood (ME) were mentored by McCallum while they were developing an audiovisual device to help stimulate brain activity in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Through this mentorship, Singer and Wood recognized possible use cases and commercialization pathways for their technology.

“Their device has potential applications in a wide range of other neurological conditions — to lessen the impact of these disorders on people in their everyday life,” says McCallum, adding, “I’m excited about Georgia Tech and Emory’s commitment to developing programs to enhance neuroscience and neural engineering research. There’s so much potential in that space, especially for being able to significantly impact diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease, as well as strokes and epilepsy. We are moving in the right direction with being able to improve the efficacy of the modalities to diagnose and treat these conditions.”

According to McCallum, his close connection to CREATE-X has given him a unique opportunity to see the impact of the program on the entrepreneurial endeavors of students and even faculty members. 

“Previous fellows have been very successful with developing new educational programs and courses, as well as creating new spaces to spawn innovation, to instill entrepreneurial confidence in undergraduate students, and I want to use those successes as inspiration to make an impact on graduate student entrepreneurial confidence in BME, with much more to come,” he said.

As one of President Ángel Cabrera's four Big Bets, the drive for entrepreneurial education and opportunities has accelerated at Georgia Tech. In 2023, over a third of all Georgia Tech applicants selected entrepreneurship as an interest. Pope Fellows have a unique opportunity to help students tap into entrepreneurial pathways with CREATE-X, access an abundance of resources, and solve real-world problems. For faculty interested in joining, applications are open for the 2025 Jim Pope Fellowship until Sept. 2. For more information, visit https://create-x.gatech.edu/faculty/jim-pope-fellowship.

The idea of people experiencing their favorite mobile apps as immersive 3D environments took a step closer to reality with a new Google-funded research iniative at Georgia Tech. 

A new approach proposed by Tech researcher Yalong Yang uses generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies to convert almost any mobile or web-based app into a 3D environment. 

That includes application software programs from Microsoft and Adobe as well as any social media (Tiktok), entertainment (Spotify), banking (PayPal), or food service app (Uber Eats) and everything in between.

Yang aims to make the 3D environments compatible with augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) headsets and smart glasses. He believes his research could be a breakthrough in spatial computing and change how humans interact with their favorite apps and computer systems in general.

“We’ll be able to turn around and see things we want, and we can grab them and put them together,” said Yang, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “We’ll no longer use a mouse to scroll or the keyboard to type, but we can do more things like physical navigation.”

Yang’s proposal recently earned him recognition as a 2025 Google Research Scholar. Along with converting popular social apps, his platform will be able to instantly render Photoshop, MS Office, and other workplace applications in 3D for AR/VR devices.

“We have so many applications installed in our machines to complete all the various types of work we do,” he said. “We use Photoshop for photo editing, Premiere Pro for video editing, Word for writing documents. We want to create an AR/VR ecosystem that has all these things available in one interface with all apps working cohesively to support multitasking.”

Filling The Gap With AI

Just as Google’s Veo and Open AI’s Sora use generative-AI to create video clips, Yang believes it can be used to create interactive, immersive environments for any Android or Apple app. 

“A critical gap in AR/VR is that we do not have all those existing applications, and redesigning all those apps will take forever,” he said. “It’s urgent that we have a complete ecosystem in VR to enable us to do the work we need to do. Instead of recreating everything from scratch, we need a way to convert these applications into immersive formats.”