Tag Archives: SynchroHealth

The Amulet Project Comes to a Close

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The Amulet project launched in late 2013 with the vision of “bridging the gap between the type of pervasive computing possible with a mobile phone and that enabled by wearable computing.” Now, almost 10 years, 51 publications, and 29 core members (along with many collaborators) later, Amulet is coming to a close.

Amulet was featured in Forbes magazine, has been presented to audiences at many conferences and at an mHealth summit near Washington DC, was evaluated on usability in a study amongst rural older adults with obesity, and is impacting continued health research!

Many of our students have gone on to roles in industry and academia after graduation, and Ryan Halter, the Dartmouth co-PI on the project, co-founded a startup company, SynchroHealth, with technology originating in the Amulet project.

The Amulet prototype remains available (open source, open hardware) on GitHub, and our papers are available through our Zotero library.

We thank the countless number of people who have supported the project — from advisors, to NSF program officers, to graduate and undergraduate students, to study participants, to project leads, and to you all who have kept up with the project for its 10-year run.

New grant supports commercialization of Amulet ‘BandPass’ technology

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SynchroHealth, a startup company launched with technology originating in the Amulet project, recently received a grant of almost $225,000 from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). SynchroHealth aims to develop hardware and software solutions for non-invasive detection and acquisition of remote healthcare data. 

Amulet’s Ryan Halter, co-founder of SynchroHealth, says “there’s a huge disparity in what clinicians and physical therapists think goes on in at-home rehabilitation programs and what actually happens. This disconnect […] could ultimately lead to unnecessary interventions that increase costs and potential risks to the patient. We’re aiming to close that gap.”

The current prototype of BandPass, from the SynchroHealth website

SynchroHealth is continuing the development of their ‘BandPass’ technology for the treatment of sarcopenia – loss of muscle mass and strength due to aging. BandPass is capable of monitoring, evaluating, and guiding patients in upper-body strength training in real-time. It includes sensors equipped to an exercise band with custom-designed electronics for the wireless transmission of patient data. It is unique in that the data collected could be monitored by a physician to aid in proper interventions.

Along with continuing the development of the BandPass, the team will develop a mobile application and cloud-based service for data transmission, processing, and storage. Later this year, the team will test their device on a cohort of 16 patients to obtain feedback.

This work is being supported under Award Number R41AG071290 by the National Institute On Aging of the National Institutes of Health. To learn more about BandPass and SynchroHealth, check out their website here. The Dartmouth Engineering article on this work can be found here.

The foundational research is described in academic papers [seo:theraband, peterson:chase, batsis:development].