Grand Rounds Seminar

Abstract: In cardiovascular rehabilitation, wearable technologies hold significant promise to enable continuous ambulatory hemodynamic monitoring, supporting individualized therapy optimization and data-driven clinical management beyond the clinic. However, existing cuffless wearable devices for blood pressure monitoring often rely on approaches with limited theoretical grounding, making them susceptible to poorly understood physiological and experimental confounders that compromise accuracy and clinical utility. In this talk, I will present my lab’s research on cuffless hemodynamic monitoring. In the first part of the talk, I will describe our recent work elucidating the biophysical relationship between electrical bioimpedance and vascular fluid dynamics, and how we leveraged these principles to develop a physics-informed neural network capable of estimating cuffless blood pressure and blood velocity.  In the second part, I will present our ongoing efforts on imaging pulsatile blood flow in the finger using electrical measurements. We evaluated these approaches in healthy individuals as well as in patients with hypertension and cardiovascular disease across outpatient and intensive care settings. Together, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of wearables with electricity sensing for cuffless hemodynamic monitoring, addressing critical limitations of existing wearable technologies.
 

About: Dr. Sanchez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. Previously, he completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center under the mentorship of Dr. Seward Rutkove. His research spans neuromuscular disease, cancer diagnostics, cardiovascular health, and chronic disease monitoring. He also serves in multiple advisory and leadership industry roles and has demonstrated a strong translational and commercial track record, with repeatable execution from innovation to clinical validation and industry adoption.