Every day Veterinarians help animals heal, and part of that process is keeping an eye on the animal's respiration, heart rate, and temperature using wires and probes. This can be difficult and dangerous, as animals are uncomfortable being attached to wires and can lash out at the vet. Vik Ramprakash, CEO of Structured Monitoring Products Inc, has created a solution, VetGuardian. A wireless device that sits a few feet away from the animal and requires no connection points to monitor the animal's vitals. Now, veterinarians can provide 24/7 monitoring that is non-invasive, while keeping the animal and themselves safe.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade , who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

James Di Virgilio: 0:37

Welcome to Radio Cade. I'm your host, James Di Virgilio. Today, we're going to talk about wires. Do we need them? Most of us are used to existing in a world now without wires, whether it's Bluetooth or other mediums, but how about wireless medicine? What if we can detect heartbeats and other vital signs without having anything touch your body at all? My guest today is Vik Ramprakash. He is the CEO of Structured Monitoring Products Incorporated, and he is working on just that. Vik, welcome to the program. So Vik, tell us about what you've developed. This seems almost futuristic, right? As a kid, I can remember watching movies and films where in the future, there's no doctor, it's just a machine sort of looking over you and nothing is touching you and its sensors, but you are doing this in real life.

Vik Ramprakash: 1:22

Absolutely. So basically if you put it this way, when you go to doctor's office, the very first thing they want you to do is to check how you're doing initial assessment, like at your heart rate respiration and your blood pressure. So think about every time they have to connect you to wires. And I think we live in this 21st century where things are getting more and more wireless. So one of my initial thoughts and ideas was like, what if we could do away with this virus? So that's how I started this process of thinking about it and making something towards that goal.

James Di Virgilio: 1:52

That seems extremely difficult. How difficult was it to create something that can detect a heartbeat or your breathing without contacting you?

Vik Ramprakash: 1:59

I would say I'm not the inventor for this technology. It's University of Florida where this technology was born at . So taking a step back, my background is in remote sensing technology. So when I started working with this technology, it's basically working with Landsat imagery, satellite imagery, and try and review and see how things work out. So if we could think of the same way University of Florida's electrical engineering department, they started working with sensors and Dr. (inaudible) Lynn out there has focused on Doppler data centers, which is the same kind of sensors , a useful weather technology. What he was able to do was to miniaturize it almost to a size of a credit card size, and his application was to use it for the human side. Now, here I am with a remote sensing degree and I was doing my MBA at University of Florida. I said, then I met him through, off the technology licensing from the university and we