Mobile health is a promising, rapidly developing field, but currently far from reaching its full potential. In this talk, first, we are going to discuss the fundamental challenges to overcome in order to create a robust mobile health system and which innovations does it require in the fields of mobile technologies and physics. Second, we will show how complex pre-processing of different biological samples needed for medical tests can be done using thermo-plasmonics (a new emerging sub-area of Physics). Third, we will show how mobile health systems have to be designed and developed to be compatible with a variety of different mobile platforms, and how they can be made smarter using large-scale deep learning. Finally, we will demonstrate several systems designed using this approach and show how they can be used for early detection of pregnancy complications, point-of-care hormone testing and rapid prescription of antibiotics in case of sepsis. 

Biography: Dr. Anna Pyayt is an Associate Professor and a head of the Innovative Biomedical Instruments and Systems (IBIS) lab at the University of South Florida (USF). She joined USF after being an NSF CIFellow and Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. She earned her dual Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Nanotechnology from the University of Washington. One of her inventions - Telescopic Pixel (a competitor to LCD) that Dr. Pyayt created in collaboration with Microsoft Research gained international media attention, was highlighted in Nature, and other top scientific venues. Her research was also highlighted in Science, resulted in six issued patents and forty refereed publications. Her technology for detection of pregnancy complications (Hemolix) was a Finalist of the Worldwide 2.25 Million XPrize Nokia Sensing XChallenge, and recently presented at the inaugural University Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) showcase organized by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the Association of American Universities (AAU). Finally, it was invited for a showcase at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and at the US Congress in November 2017. Her latest technology Mobile ELISA was recently covered in the international news. Finally, her research has been supported by grants from NSF, NOAA and multiple other funding sources.