Elliot Botvinick
University of California-Irvine, CA·Biomedical Engineering
After a serious injury, the difference between recovery and death often comes down to how quickly clinicians recognize that a patient's circulation is failing. Trauma, shock, and sepsis can all look similar early on, and some patients deteriorate while their vital signs still appear acceptable.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
wearable sensors
continuous monitoring
trauma
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Design and build a minimally invasive, ultra-thin flexible sensor placed just under the skin that continuously measures glucose, lactate, oxygen, and pH — analytes that report tissue oxygen delivery and metabolic stress.
- Build a flexible wearable skin patch that operates the implanted sensor and adds pulse oximetry for blood oxygenation and heart rate, with autonomous operation and wireless telemetry.
- Evaluate the combined sensor and patch system in a porcine model of hemorrhagic injury with sensor-guided resuscitation, testing whether the readings track physiological state and guide intervention.
- Validate the integrated monitoring technology to the point of initiating an Investigational Device Exemption application with the FDA for human studies.
More about the research
Measurements that would reveal the problem — how much oxygen tissue is actually receiving, whether cells are switching to oxygen-starved metabolism — are typically obtained from intermittent blood draws rather than monitored continuously. This project responds to technology gaps identified by the Department of Defense Combat Casualty Care Research Program and an NIH interest in physiological monitoring for trauma care.
Why it matters
Patients with traumatic injury, shock, or sepsis can deteriorate before standard vital signs reveal it, and military and civilian trauma care both lack continuous monitoring at the point of injury. A wearable that streams lactate, tissue oxygen, glucose, pH, and blood oxygenation could help providers triage casualties, catch hidden deterioration earlier, and adjust resuscitation in real time based on what the tissue is actually experiencing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Karen Fairchild
University of Virginia, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Refine and expand algorithms that predict sepsis and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) in very low birth weight infants, applying time series analysis and machine learning to continuous heart rate and pulse oximetry oxygen data from four NICUs.
Ismail Araci
Santa Clara University, CA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Measure how skin stretches during specific movements, such as facial or shoulder rehabilitation exercises, using digital image correlation to map skin strain fields, and use these patterns as a driving force for microfluidics.
Amay Bandodkar
North Carolina State University, NC·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Develop non-toxic sensor arrays based on biofuel cells, devices that convert a chemical reaction into an electrical signal, to detect molecular biomarkers of healing in wound exudate.
The school
University of California-Irvine: 46 labs on PI Pages, $645M a year on research, 524 research doctorates a year.
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