Shortening the Healthcare Control Loop

Abstract – The job of a healthcare provider is to provide interventions that help control the complex system that governs the health of individuals. Though it is well known that timely feedback is a critical component in controlling complex systems, the feedback loop in healthcare is typically far from timely. Interventions often occur after the system has gone unstable, and are often based on unnecessarily incomplete information. Furthermore, the impacts of interventions are often poorly or belatedly monitored.

This talk will briefly outline the basic issues, and then discuss two research projects aimed at ameliorating the problem. One project aims to use mobile telemedicine to improve neo-natal intensive care. The system uses custom software and off-the-shelf hardware that can reliably deliver high-quality video from both stationary sites and moving vehicles, by opportunistically aggregating wireless data networks. The second project is aimed at improving the lives of people with epilepsy, the third most common neurological disorder in the United States, behind Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. The talk will present our algorithmic work on building patient specific seizure detectors, an evaluation of our detectors against other state-of-the-art techniques, and our current work on translating these results into clinical applications.

Biography – Professor Guttag also co-heads the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s Networks and Mobile Systems Group. This group studies issues related to computer networks, applications of networked and mobile systems, and advanced software-based medical instrumentation and decision systems. Professor Guttag has also done research, published, and lectured in the areas of software defined radios, software engineering, mechanical theorem proving, and hardware verification.

Professor Guttag currently serves on the technical advisory board of Vanu, Inc., on the Board of Directors of Empirix, and on the Board of Trustees of the MGH Institute of Health Professions. He is also a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.