OBJECTIVE: Heightened muscular effort and breathlessness (dyspnea) are disabling sensory experiences. We sought to improve the current approach of assessing these symptoms only at the maximal effort to new paradigms based on their continuous quantification throughout cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET). MATERIALS AND METHODS: After establishing sex- and age-adjusted reference centiles (0-10 Borg scale), we developed a novel algorithm (AI-Techniques Loss-Based Algorithm for Severity Classification [ATLAS]) based on reciprocal exponential loss for CPET data from patients with chronic obstructive lung disease of varied severity. RESULTS: Categories of dyspnea intensity by ATLAS-but not dyspnea at peak exercise-correctly discriminated patients in progressively higher resting and exercise impairment (P < .05). DISCUSSION: This new AI-techniques approach will be translated to the care of disabled patients to uncover the seeds and consequences of their activity-related symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: We used innovative informatics research to change paradigms in displaying, quantifying, and analyzing effort-related symptoms in patient populations.

Prototyping large, electronically integrated structures is challenging and often results in unwieldy wiring, weak mechanical properties, expensive iterations, or limited reusability. While many electronics prototyping kits exist for small-scale objects, relatively few methods exist to freely iterate large and sturdy structures with integrated electronics. To address this gap, we present the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK), which uses reconfigurable blocks that assemble into high-stiffness, lightweight structures with integrated electronics. We do this by creating cubic blocks composed of PCBs that carry electrical routing and components and can be (re)configured with simple tools into a variety of structures. To ensure structural stability without expertise, we created a tool to configure structures and simulate applied loads, which we validated with mechanical testing data. Using VIK, we produced devices reconfigured from a shared set of voxels: multiple iterations of a customizable AV lounge seat, a dance floor game, and a force-sensing bridge.