Monitoring & Testing

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According to a recent report from ABI Research, a market intelligence company specializing in global technology markets, while the market for disposable wireless Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) sensors within professional healthcare is in its earliest stages, the foundations to support adoption are now in place. They also report that there is a tremendous potential for adoption. So much so that by 2018, they predict that nearly 5 million disposable sensors will be shipped even though the sensors will have still barely penetrated the addressable market.

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Scientists at Princeton University in New Jersey used silk strands and tiny gold wires bundled with graphene to create a removable tattoo that adheres to dental enamel and could eventually be used to monitor a patient’s health with unprecedented sensitivity.

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A new 3-D motion detection system could help identify baseball pitchers who are at risk for shoulder injuries, according to a new study by scientists at the Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, IL. The laptop computer-based system can be used right on the field.

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Electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) measurements typically involve time-consuming skin preparation, lead application, conductive gels, and even shaving of body hair. More recently, dry contact sensors have come into use in some sports and home health monitoring units, but these frequently experience contact problems, particularly in users with dry skin.
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Ultrasound technology could soon be improved to produce high-quality, highresolution images, thanks to the development of a new key material by a team of researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station.
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NASA Technology

You wouldn’t find a big bowl of spaghetti served on the International Space Station (ISS). In microgravity, it would be a complete mess. There is, however, something like spaghetti on the ISS: the wires that connect electrodes for an electrocardiogram (EKG). They can be just as much of a nuisance for the crew members.
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A tiny, paper-thin skin patch to collect vital information, called the Bio-patch sensor, has been developed by researchers at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology. It is inexpensive, versatile, and comfortable to wear.

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A wireless personal health monitoring system using smartphones to upload data via the Internet will revolutionize the US healthcare industry, say its creators at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. mHealth capitalizes on what Dr. Emil Jovanov, associate dean for graduate education and research in the College of Engineering, calls "major revolutions" in computer informatics, smartphones, and energy-efficient and miniaturized electronics and sensors. It can provide health information to the patient directly, to the physician via the Internet, and to researchers as aggregated databases.

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When babies are deprived of oxygen before birth, brain damage and disorders such as cerebral palsy can occur. Extended cooling can help to prevent brain injuries, but, in developing nations where advanced medical care is scarce, this treatment is not always available. To address this need, undergraduates at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, have devised a low-cost, low-tech unit to provide protective cooling for infants. The device, called the Cooling Cure, can lower a newborn’s temperature by about 6 degrees Fahrenheit for three days, which has been shown to protect the baby from brain damage if administered shortly after a loss of oxygen has occurred, such as when the umbilical cord is knotted or if there is a problem with the placenta during a difficult birth.

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This non-invasive monitoring method can be used to evaluate the mental state of people performing critical tasks.

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging optical neuroimaging technology that indirectly measures neuronal activity in the cortex via neurovascular coupling. It quantifies hemoglobin concentration ([Hb]) and thus measures the same hemodynamic response as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but is portable, non-confining, relatively inexpensive, and is appropriate for long-duration monitoring and use at the bedside. Like fMRI, it is noninvasive and safe for repeated measurements. Patterns of [Hb] changes are used to classify cognitive state. Thus, fNIRS technology offers much potential for application in operational contexts. For instance, the use of fNIRS to detect the mental state of commercial aircraft operators in near real time could allow intelligent flight decks of the future to optimally support human performance in the interest of safety by responding to hazardous mental states of the operator. However, many opportunities remain for improving robustness and reliability. It is desirable to reduce the impact of motion and poor optical coupling of probes to the skin. Such artifacts degrade signal quality and thus cognitive state classification accuracy. Field application calls for further development of algorithms and filters for the automation of bad channel detection and dynamic artifact removal.
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As cardiovascular disease has increased globally in recent decades, clinical demand for transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) has risen along with it. In TEE, a clinician inserts an ultrasound probe by mouth and guides it through the esophagus to capture images of the functioning heart. The procedure is commonly used by cardiac anesthesiologists to monitor patients undergoing surgery and in intensive care—as well as by imaging specialists to diagnose valvular heart disease.
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For a patient experiencing a brain aneurysm, every second in the operating room counts in quickly and successfully clipping the aneurysm to stop blood flow and prevent permanent damage. Today, thanks to a new patented 3D surgical rehearsal platform created by Surgical Theater LLC, neurosurgeons can plan, safely rehearse, and perform complex surgeries utilizing a patient’s own CT and MRI images/scans (DICOM) before entering the operating room.
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A team of scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, have developed a tiny implantable device that can analyze the concentration of up to five proteins and organic acids in the blood simultaneously, and then transmit the results directly to a doctor's computer.

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The Human Connectome Project, a five-year project to link brain connectivity to human behavior, has released a set of high-quality imaging and behavioral data to the scientific community. The project has two major goals: to collect vast amounts of data using advanced brain imaging methods on a large population of healthy adults, and to make the data freely available so that scientists worldwide can make further discoveries about brain circuitry.

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Imperial College London, London, UK
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk

A new system to allow specialists to image difficult areas of the body, which could potentially improve the way procedures such as knee replacement surgery are carried out, is being developed by researchers at Imperial College London.
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An estimated one and half million individuals seek medical treatment for head trauma in the US each year, and annually about 10 million individuals seek treatment for head trauma worldwide. Intracranial hematomas resulting from a traumatic brain injury are a life-threatening, but treatable cause of secondary brain injury in patients who have sustained head trauma. But, successful treatment often relies upon timely diagnosis and intervention prior to the occurrence of brain damage. A computed tomography (CT) scan is the current clinical standard examination to detect this condition.
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Doctors regularly check patients’ hand-eye coordination to monitor any neuromuscular deficits, particularly as they age or when they are injured, but the tests may be subjective and qualitative. To more clearly assess changes, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Hebrew SeniorLife, Boston, recently completed the first clinical study of a new rapid neuro assessment device they developed to quantitatively measure neuromuscular performance.

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The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping America and the world, issued a report finding that only about seven percent of people surveyed used a smartphone app to track a health indicator like weight, diet, exercise routine, or to monitor a chronic disease such as diabetes. The research suggests that consumers are slow to latch on to smartphone technology for health even in a market with hundreds of new apps coming on the market to manage weight and track blood pressure, pregnancy, blood sugar, diabetes or medication. The report says that health app uptake has been essentially flat for three years.

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According to Jonathan Linkous, CEO of The American Telemedicine Association (ATA), Washington, DC, after 40-plus years of development, telemedicine is finally becoming mainstream in transforming the delivery of care. He said that more than five million Americans had their medical images read remotely last year, approximately 10% of all the intensive care unit beds in the US use telemedicine; and one million Americans benefit from remote cardiac monitoring for implantable devices or for checking on a suspected cardiac arrhythmia. There are now more than 13,000 consumer health applications for the iPhone alone.
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Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, New York, using his previously developed lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world, and synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records. And he was able to do it, 10 times faster, researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from his lab. Sia says that this is a major advance towards providing people in remote areas of the world with laboratory-quality diagnostic services usually available only in centralized health care settings.

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Researchers at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, have developed an imaging system enclosed in a capsule about the size of a multivitamin pill that creates detailed, microscopic images of the esophageal wall and has several advantages over traditional endoscopy. This will enable physicians to screen patients for Barrett's esophagus, a precancerous condition usually caused by chronic exposure to stomach acid, they say, without patient sedation, a specialized setting and equipment, or a physician trained in endoscopy.

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Breathing sensors built into onesie infant bodysuits could help prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), where a sleeping infant suddenly stops breathing. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin used an integrated sensor system made from a stretchable printed circuit board (PCB) that fits to the contours of the body built into a onesie. They say that it can be manufactured using routine industrial processes.

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It is common knowledge among astronauts living aboard the International Space Station, that they grow up to 3 percent taller while living in microgravity. Then, when they return to Earth, they return to their normal height. Studying the impact of this change on the spine and advancing medical imaging technologies are the goals of NASA’s Spinal Ultrasound investigation.

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Survival climbs, risk of unnecessary shocks plummets

A new study at the University of Rochester Medical Center Rochester, NY, shows that defibrillators, which are designed to detect and correct dangerous heart rhythms, can be programmed to help users live longer, better lives, than they currently do.
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Electrical engineers at Oregon State University, Corvallis, have developed new technology to monitor medical vital signs, with sensors so tiny and inexpensive they could fit onto a bandage, be manufactured in high volumes, and cost less than a quarter. One potential application is heart monitoring, since the system could gather data on some components of an EKG, such as pulse rate and atrial fibrillation. Its ability to measure EEG brain signals could find use in nursing care for patients with dementia, and recordings of physical activity could improve weight loss programs.
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