Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As the well known baby boomer generation surges toward retirement age, the issue becomes more significant each day of how this generation of 78 million seniors will be able to remain as independent as possible while increasingly burdened by the onset of multiple, chronic, medical conditions and a decline in cognitive abilities. Concurrent with the dramatic incr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary/Abstract This project will improve the energy efficiency of home oxygen concentrators for patients on long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) and save energy costs for the patients. The number of patients on LTOT is estimated to be 1.2 million. The cost of electricity can vary from one region, to another so it is difficult to determine the exact monthly ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Advanced Medical Electronics Corporation (AME) proposes to develop a smartphone-based adaptive audiovisual array that enables hearing aid users to converse with multiple speakers in reverberant environments with significant speech babble noise where their hearing aids do not function well. The array will consist of a smartphone, a smartphone accessory, and a sm ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is difficult for people who are blind or have low vision to recognize people in a variety of social interactions. Sole reliance on voice recognition may be difficult in some circumstances, and impossible in other circumstances, e.g., people within a group who do not speak. The inability to identify people during group meetings is a disadvantage for blind peo ...

Organophosphorus chemical warfare nerve agents (OP-CWA) are attractive to terrorist groups and rogue states as an inexpensive and accessible technology for chemical warfare. OP-CWA and organophosphate pesticides cause severe neurological symptoms and death by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE); the resulting excess acetylcholine accumulates and overstimulates the human or animal bo ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An estimated 30% of chronic stroke patients with motor disabilities of the limbs are plegic in the hand or the foot - that is, they cannot move the hand or foot. While some plegic stroke patients have completely paralyzed muscles, without the ability to activate even minimally the plegic muscles ( profound plegia ), other plegic stroke patients are capable of p ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Scleroderma (also known as systemic sclerosis-SSc) is an autoimmune disorder characterized primarily by progressive dermal and vascular fibrosis. Other organs are affected too, including lung, heart, esophagus, intestine, and kidney. Many patients who suffer from scleroderma/SSc also have a loss of pulmonary function. Scleroderma/SSc affects approximately 400,0 ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Acute Pancreatitis (AP) is a potentially lethal inflammatory disease of the pancreas. Its pathogenesis remains obscure and is involved in a process of acute inflammation and necrosis in the pancreas, with variable involvement of regional tissues or organ systems that leads to a systemic inflammatory response. AP contributes to thousands of annual hospital admis ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Liver fibrosis, a disease affecting tens of millions of people worldwide, is the liver scarring response to chronic injury from excessive alcohol use, virus infection (hepatitis B and C), iron overload or extrahepatic obstructions and can progress to liver cirrhosis, liver failure and death. In fact, deaths from complications of liver fibrosis/cirrhosis are exp ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Liver fibrosis is a form of scar formation that is found in almost all patients with chronic injury to the liver. Over time it frequently progresses to cirrhosis, an end-stage lethal disease which is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and afflicts hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Alcohol intake remains the most important cause of l ...