1/19/2022
Professor Thanh (Helen) Nguyen and lecturer/research scientist Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis have projects that received funding through the Jump ARCHES research and development program aimed at addressing a variety of vexing medical challenges.
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Twenty research projects are sharing slightly more than $1.4 million in funding through the Jump ARCHES research and development program to address a variety of vexing medical challenges including neurological testing for children and athletes (such as concussions), migraines and stress among nurses enduring pandemic challenges at home and at work. Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Thanh (Helen) Nguyen and lecturer/research scientist Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis have projects that received funding.
The Jump ARCHES program is a partnership between OSF HealthCare and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I) and its College of Medicine in Peoria (UICOMP). The funding supports research involving clinicians, engineers and social scientists to rapidly develop technologies and devices that could revolutionize medical training and health care delivery. Many of the awards represent new projects, while some will build on previously-funded efforts.
Read the full press release here.
The projects involving CEE at Illinois faculty are:
Development of a Coordinated and Community-Focused Network of Antibiotic Use and Resistance Data
Ellen Moodie, UIUC; Thanh (Helen) Nguyen, UIUC; Rebecca Smith, UIUC; Rachel Whitaker, UIUC; Brian Laird, OSF HealthCare
In order to understand the human context in which antimicrobial resistance evolves, we need to be able to collect and coordinate data on the relationship of people and health care providers in a diverse community that has been identified as a health care desert. This must include both qualitative data in particular vulnerable communities and aggregated and comprehensive but local across health care providers (metadata on prescription practices and diagnostic results) which is uncoordinated amongst the many organizations working in this community. Therefore, we will also create a data coordination platform for the secure and anonymized sharing of data related to antimicrobial use and resistance within the Champaign County community as an exemplar of dynamics in a multi-cultural agricultural landscape with substantial human mobility.
Improving the Lives of Children with Asthma by Individualizing the Asthma Care Plan Based on Children's Home Exposure to Asthma Triggers
Elise Albers, OSF HealthCare; Sotiria Koloutsou-Vakakis, UIUC; Margarita Guerin, UICOMP
The project team proposes a pilot study with indoor air monitoring devices (sensors) that can be deployed in homes and schools of a small cohort of OSF pediatric patients with asthma. The air quality data collected by these sensors will be used to individualize the asthma care plan, taking into account the environmental allergens and pollutants that are present in the patient’s home and providing education on how to mitigate these environmental exposures.