Project Mentor: Dr. Amirtahà Taebi, Bioengineering
2027 Impact Fellows:
Project Description:
Critical congenital heart disease (CCHD) is a leading cause of infant mortality worldwide, yet thousands of newborns in low-resource settings go unscreened due to the high cost and scarcity of specialized diagnostic equipment. Early detection in the first days of life is vital, as delayed diagnosis frequently leads to severe, preventable complications or death. To address this urgent clinical gap, this Global Social Impact Fellowship project focuses on engineering a low-cost, custom wearable device tailored specifically for newborn CCHD screening.
Unlike software-only health platforms, student researchers on this team will gain direct, hands-on experience in physical biomedical device design, prototyping multimodal cardiac sensors, and conducting human subject testing on campus at Lehigh. Through an iterative engineering process, undergraduates will refine the wearable's physical hardware, develop robust data-processing algorithms, and participate in field-testing with newborn populations in Brazil. This project offers an extraordinary opportunity for students in engineering, computing, and health sciences to build hardware-enabled medical technology and deliver life-saving diagnostic tools to vulnerable infant populations.