The team of Colin Barry, Tatsuo Kumamoto, Edward Wang, and Lina Battikha won the Audience Choice Award for Best Demo at the IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Body Sensor Networks – Computational Medicine: Expanding Health through Sensing and AI held from November 3-5, 2025 for their demo entitled, "Oscillometric Smartphone Blood Pressure Demo." Source: LinkedIn Post
On Thursday October 30, 2025, Billion Labs Inc. was voted Best Demo by the audience at the Start-up demo showcase as part of an event put on by the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative (eWEAR). Source: LinkedIn Post
Title: VibroBP: Calibrationless Smartphone BP Monitoring using Vibrometric Force Estimation Authors: Colin Barry, Tatsuo Kumamoto, Yinan Xuan, Ava Fascetti, Amparo Averbuj, Edward J Wang
This is an R21 award for $650,000 over a period of 3 years. Their smartphone app prototype capitalizes on the handheld nature of a mobile phone and uses its built-in sensors to gauge grip strength to enhance preoperative screening for potential risks of complications post cardiac surgery. This effort will contribute to the growing portfolio of smartphone-based health monitoring solutions actively being developed by Wang and his research team. Source: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/uc-san-diego-researcher-receives-nih-trailblazer-award
Authors: Colin Barry, Yinan Xuan, Ava Fascetti, Alison Moore, Edward J Wang Abstract This paper proposes a smartphone-based method for measuring Blood Pressure (BP) using the oscillometric method. For oscillometry, it is necessary to measure (1) the pressure applied to the artery and (2) the local blood volume change. This is accomplished by performing an oscillometric measurement at the finger's digital artery, whereby a user presses down on the phone's camera with steadily increasing force. The camera is used to capture the blood volume change using photoplethysmography. We devised a novel method for measuring the force applied of the finger without the use of specialized smartphone hardware with a technique called Vibrometric Force Estimation (VFE). The fundamental concept of VFE relies on a phenomenon where a vibrating object is dampened when an external force is…
Authors: Yinan Xuan, Ava J. Fascetti, Colin Barry, Edward J. Wang Abstract BPClip is an ultra-low-cost cuffless blood pressure monitor. As a universal smartphone attachment, BPClip leverages the computational imaging power of smartphones to perform oscillometry based blood pressure measurements. This paper examines different design considerations in BPClip's development. The cost and accuracy of blood pressure measurements are the central design goals. Both requirements are achieved with the initial prototype that achieves a 0.80 USD material cost and a mean absolute error of 8.72 and 5.49 mmHg for systolic and diastolic blood pressure, respectively. Since a main motivator to develop BPClip is making blood pressure monitoring more accessible, usability is also central to the design. User studies were conducted throughout the design process to inform the most intuitive and accessible design features. In this paper,…
Billion Labs Inc was honored with a DNDA24 Special Recognition for "Reducing Barrier to Access Hypertension Screening Globally." What they said: Billion Labs Inc. is a startup company whose mission is to transform the billions of smartphones in everyone’s pocket to screen for critical health conditions like all-cause mortality, hypertension, diabetes, and more with nothing but a download of an app, making health monitoring affordable and accessible to everyone. Their solution, Vibro, is a smartphone app that requires no extra devices to measure blood pressure. The ultimate goal is to provide affordable blood pressure monitoring by leveraging the existing smartphone infrastructure. Even if an individual does not own a smartphone personally, access can be bootstrapped through family and community support, reducing barriers of accessing hypertension screening. Through iterative design process, the team continues to refine…