Richie and Ryan Huynh are juniors at Champlain High School. They won the 4th prize in the International Science Fair for their study of variations in blood pressure with ambulatory blood pressure monitors. Specifically, they examined how exercise affects blood pressure. Their hypothesis was that it was time of day dependent. They investigated the effect of ethnicity, academic orientattion, stress, age, gender, and athletic orientation. The exercises included jump rope, pushups and curl ups. Click here for a summary of their study.
Ryan and Richie asked us to describe the Phoenix project. Chris described it and showed him the Phoenix Ambulatory Blood Pressure System, specifically the system block diagram and noted that the keys that will distinguish Phoenix are the sensors and the integration with the diary.
We were interested in the diary process. When they removed the APBMs for bathing, they recharged the ABPM, and this took an hour.
From a logistics perspective over the five week study, others became annoyed at the alarm, especially their classroom teachers. Participants had problems dealing with rashes. One subject's father made him stop. Participants had to deal with the alarms and ABPM measurements waking them at night. Though many more students were interested, they selected their participants so that they had the same sleep and wake cycle. Out of 14 participants, 3 or 4 had rashes, but all them felt itchy. Many participants felt that it was annoying to carry the ABPMs. They took manual reading before and after exercise.
They noted the time they woke, when they went to sleep, had meals, medications, exercises, and abnormal stress. All students took the same classes, so they knew what they were doing and when. At the begining, they were given a letter explaining the process, another letter telling them how to do it, and another letter to maintain it.
One participant had an equipment mailfunction, lost a week of data. Then, another's machine had too much data and suffered a data storage malfunction. Another subject had to drop out because of a rash, so they substituted the working machine for the malfuncted machine. They used Halberg Chronobiology Center's analysis sofware. The previously used ABPM enabled diary codes, but this system did not.
Initially, the subjects were excited, but after one week some were less enthusiastic. During weeks 2-4, some participants had rashes. By the week 5, the last week, the participants became excited again. Richie and Ryan gave them prizes for completion of milestones. One participant with sustained abnormal CHAT was taking medications throughout the study.
The diary included the exercise values, like number of jump robes, push ups, curl ups, and their times.
They concluded that a diary was too much to expect their particpants to create. They should all have similar week schedule and sleep cycles, then they only had to record when necessary, so that abmormal activities were minimal and only those were recorded.
Germaine noted that occaisonally blood pressure is highly correlated with meals.
Chris: The software team is picking a direction and priority. There are two areas to put effort, 1) OS in the device itself, 2) the physiologist workstation. The clinical and self help areas are iomportant, but we don't are not likely to make progress there at this time.
Dave: The sensor team has met several times. Dave is building a piezo film sensor and amplifier.
Chris: We need to have a collaborative infrastructure. Dennis suggested a Wiki we can deploy.
Our next meeting will occur on June 26.
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