Benjamin Sanchez Terrones
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Passing a tiny, harmless electrical current through the body and measuring how much the tissue resists it can reveal a lot about what is inside: how blood flows through arteries, or how healthy a muscle is. This measurement, called bioimpedance, needs no needles, radiation or bulky equipment.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
bioimpedance
BioZ
cuffless blood pressure
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Dec 2029
What they work on
- Develop new bioimpedance (BioZ) measurement methods, grounded in principles of fluid flow and electricity, for a wearable watch that estimates blood pressure continuously without an inflatable cuff.
- Link blood pressure to BioZ signals using physiological, computational and machine learning models, including models of how cellular-level biological sources give rise to both signals.
- Evaluate the accuracy of the cuffless blood pressure predictions in a cohort of people covering a wide range of ages and body indices.
- Build a physics-informed analytical and simulation framework, combined with explainable artificial intelligence, that models muscle's multicellular architecture and extracts biological information from electrical impedance myography (EIM) data.
- Assess natural biological variability in EIM using computer simulations, and test how robust EIM-generating models are, with ex vivo tissue measurements as proof of principle for healthy and diseased muscle.
More about the research
That makes it a candidate for cheap, wearable or bedside health tools. Both of the lab's projects aim to turn bioimpedance signals into reliable medical information. To do this, they combine physical models of how electricity moves through cells and tissues with computer simulation and machine learning.
Why it matters
Hypertension affects nearly half of US adults and is a risk factor for heart failure, the leading cause of death in the US. A comfortable, inexpensive, cuffless blood pressure watch could support continuous monitoring outside the clinic and may help reduce hospitalizations related to hypertension. Better tools for interpreting electrical impedance myography could give clinicians a fast, painless bedside test for diagnosing and tracking neuromuscular diseases. Such a test could also help streamline clinical drug trials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bernard Choi
University of California-Irvine, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Complete and validate an initial wearable prototype that integrates a MEMS-based blood pressure sensor with a compensatory reserve index sensor measuring how much circulatory reserve remains before collapse.
Erik Henricson
University of California-Davis, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether movement performance, community mobility and patient-reported independence and well-being reflect one shared mobility process, using integrated computational models.
Todd Freeborn
University of Alabama, AL·Engineering
Model and fabricate fractional-order electronic components, whose behavior follows non-integer-order equations, and validate them experimentally.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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