CMU Sensor Objectively Measures Scratching Intensity

Now a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, Padmanabha has helped invent a wearable device that can objectively measure the intensity of scratching. The tablet then estimated the scratch intensity in milliwatts. A machine learning algorithm then correlated the raw input from the sensor with the scratch intensity estimates from the tablet. They then converted the scratch intensity to a 0-10 scale that physicians use in practice. For instance, scratch intensity reported by one patient as a 10 might be the equivalent of another patient’s 4.