Paramedic here - I could see this being useful in the emergency medicine world, if it ever gets to market. Lots of cool things are starting to get included in our cardiac monitors (LifePak 15, Zoll X Series, etc.). And guess what ... almost every single patient already gets 4-10 stickers put on them :).
Recent-ish advancements in tech here have made it possible to continuously measure the amount of exhaled CO2 from a patient's breath, transmit EKGs wirelessly for review by a physician in a hospital, and automatically cycle a blood pressure cuff at any interval we want. All in a patient's living room with equipment carried in one hand. In the very near future these devices will widely incorporate video laryngoscopy using their screens to assist in endotracheal intubations. Video laryngoscopes are already everywhere in the field, but they use their own screen/tablet and require extra work to get recordings out of for documentation purposes.
Ultrasound (the traditional kind - nothing like this article's stickers) is already on board some ambulances. Mostly used for locating deeper veins on people that are otherwise tough/impossible to get IV access on, checking for pneumothorax, or verifying death by confirming there's no heart wall movement.
It's not out of the realm of possibility for the cardiac monitors to gobble up the ultrasound functionality next, and incorporate that into the EKG lead stickers.
> Recent-ish advancements in tech here have made it possible to continuously measure the amount of exhaled CO2 from a patient's breath, transmit EKGs wirelessly for review by a physician in a hospital, and automatically cycle a blood pressure cuff at any interval we want.
None of these things mentioned require any recent tech advances. This could literally be done in the 80s.
It’s more a testament to how slow meaningful progress has been made in healthcare tech for economic, political and scientific reasons - the non cynical aspect is that for a lot of the cost involved the benefits in outcomes are not necessarily there.
I agree with you in principle but I think you're missing the magic that makes this all possible.
That magic is the cheap and ubiquitous GSM wireless network which is something that wasn't possible in the 80s.
I agree that we should have cheaper innovations in medicine, that we're held back by entrenched interests, and that we could have had cheaper elecommuncation network access a decade or so ago, but some of this simply wasn't possible in the time frame that you're talking about.
No I am fully aware. We used to process credit cards over the AMPS (analog) mobile phone network - and this is also how EKGs were sent by EMTs in that timeframe - prior to that in the 1970s they used a dedicated chunk of 70cm spectrum. The items listed are a seriously small amount of data. Sure it’s a bit cheaper now - but we were integrating GPRS modules into embedded hardware in the 90s, it wasn’t that expensive.
It was ubiquitous enough in urban and suburban areas in the US and Canada. The coverage of AMPS was solid, what was limited was the bandwidth and capacity - but there were far fewer users. Coverage in remote rural areas was poorer but still - in the late 80s it was being used for EMT transmittal of telemetry. And as stated using dedicated spectrum this is a 1970s tech. On rereading the OP I am more puzzled what they are talking about because it seems like they are talking about EMT monitoring as opposed to continuous home monitoring - the former we have been doing for 50 years.
> verifying death by confirming there's no heart wall movement
Is that something you can use for verifying death? It was my impression that people can still be revived in that state (not easily, but…). Is this just popular misconceptions speaking?
> Conclusion: Resuscitation efforts to achieve ROSC, contributing to neurologically intact survival, are needed for at least 38.5 minutes in patients with witnessed OHCA.
The commenters you’re replying to have no idea what they’re talking about. There’s virtually no where on earth where basic and advanced cardiac life support isn’t performed, especially in hospitals.
“In a lot of hospitals, esp in developing countries, the heart rate is still taken as the default indicator for life.”
That’s just nonsense on multiple levels. A person in Vfib or pulseless electrical activity has a “heart rate” but they are inevitably going to die without intervention - they are just as dead as someone with asystole. So nowhere in the world is a heart rate an indicator for life - that isn’t a cultural issue that’s a basic physiology one.
A lack of heart rate is not a necessary nor sufficient indication of death!
The medical indications for basic and advanced cardiac life support are clearly understood throughout the world at this point.
Cultural attitudes towards CPR vary - some of that has to do with education as well. It’s a complicated subject, but Hacker News comments don’t seem to be the most fruitful place to have that discussion.
Reducing CPR to “clinging to life at all costs” is not coming from an informed point of view. CPR performed on a 25 year old otherwise healthy trauma victim and a 95 year old with heart failure are not comparable.
“ Then, Zhao envisions ultrasound stickers could be packaged and purchased by patients and consumers, and used not only to monitor various internal organs, but also the progression of tumors, as well as the development of fetuses in the womb.”
It would be amazing to be able to easily ultrasound the womb at any time. I get so anxious in the first months of pregnancy since I cant yet feel kicks to make sure the babys still okay. But if I could continuously check… well, it’d either squash my anxiety entirely car or amplify it to the extreme! Either way, it’d be a game changer.
My son was IVF so we already have images of him most parents would never see (e.g. blast stage), but having a long term ultrasound time lapse of those 9 months of my son would be pretty amazing.
I’m not sure how safe that would be. I’m a radiologist and we practice with a principle called “as low as reasonably achievable” to minimize harm.
While ultrasound is not ionizing radiation it does cause tissue heating. 24/7 ultrasound is a huge increase from our current practice and seems medically unnecessary beyond being “cool”.
Is there a video showing the images of "heart, lung, and other internal organs"? I couldn't figure out what the image in the video is. They show it being placed on an arm and say that the ultrasound has something to do with the neck?
Its pretty baffling to me why we don't do ultrasounds a lot more than we currently do them. Recently went down the rabbit hole of childhood cancers and there are so many that can be detected and treated earlier if ultrasounds were a standard practice at every check up.
The rationale for not doing it seems to be just cost , and its likely you dont have cancer. But if you do , I would sure like to know early!
My dad recently learned he had a heart valve defect that many first learn about when it kills them; surgery fixed it. Doctor suggested his children should be checked for the same. The check involved doing an ultrasound of the heart. One ultrasound per person could save lives. I'm not sure why every baby (fetus) gets an ultra sound but once born they usually get none.
The rationale for not doing so is that it has never been investigated in a controlled study. The benefit would have to be proven to make patients live longer or better lives overall, and the risk of iatrogenic harms from doing ultrasounds at every checkup would be astronomical. Not to mention the additional cost.
The rationale is that is you end up with more false-positives, which need to be ruled out with more invasive testing (biopsy) which not only costs more, but also has risks of it's own.
So testing more can actually result in worse health outcomes than limited testing.
Almost nobody either in the US or out of it is spending their own money for healthcare, it's usually them spending the money of their health insurance plan, be it private or public.
Also, as mentioned above, the ROI of overtesting can well be negative.
There are plenty of people who can spend their own money for healthcare. Anyway, as mentioned explicitly above, the ROI for that cohort can be different for the groups that don't spend their own money.
Probably the societal ROI is better for spending more of its healthcare money on something else anyway.
More relevantly, people who are paying for their own care can choose how to address any issues discovered by testing. If you're on a trip deciding where to go and someone tells you not to look at part of the map because it is a dangerous area, does it make sense to blindly believe them or to look at it, do further investigation and then decide whether to travel there?
I'm not sure why they're delaying things by focusing on making it wireless "so it can be wearable". A few years ago I wore a portable heart monitor for a three days and it was very much wired and it was fine, you get used to it. If you have a useful medical device that can help people then release a wired version now and go for wireless later if you really want to.
In the video, they did mention at the end that the device, in its wired form, can be useful for continuous (e.g. 48 hours) ultrasound monitoring in a hospital setting.
All I can see is the amount of the application for a product like this and I wonder if there would be a permeant way to watch internal organs allowing the study of organs their entire life cycle. Additionally, I wonder the application to this in the medical testing community.
Ultrasound warms tissues through friction, what effect will a sticker that just continuously pulses ultrasounds have on organs it is constantly monitoring?
This was my initial reaction also, but then realized the use case probably isn't always on continuous use.
An expecting parent is very excited by seeing the ultrasound of their unborn child. Maybe they wear a patch for a few hours to get more imaging, but I don't think they're going to do 24/7 for months at the risk of harming the baby.
As an individual, I want cheap at-home imaging. Right now, I don't know if I have a fractured bone. I'd like to know. It doesn't rise to the level of seeing a doctor, but I'd do things differently based on whether or not I do.
I'd also like to do frequent, early screenings for things like cancers. I'd like imaging cheap enough to where I'm scanned at every physical.
What number of false positives would you accept from being scanned at every physical though? If you get 3 colonoscopies, some liver biopsies, and a few trachescopies, you might not like the unprompted full scans.
The fractured bone is a different case, because you have reason to suspect something. That makes a lot of sense. But general unprompted scanning is not necessarily a good idea.
I think I would welcome any number of false positives, so long as they were presented with appropriate statistics.
For example, if the system told me I had a 1% chance of having a cancer somewhere, due to a small lump, I could decide if it's worth pursuing. On the other hand, if it told me I had a 99.99% chance of having a rapidly growing cancer somewhere, I'd go to the doctor.
The big things would be caught early.
The little things -- they could be tracked. If I have a pinhead-sized growth, and it's staying fixed, it's probably okay. If it's doubling every day, I might want to get it checked out.
> Right now, I don't know if I have a fractured bone. I'd like to know. It doesn't rise to the level of seeing a doctor
This would seem like like something that might warrant a doctors visit, though I understand that’s easier to say when there is zero financial implication to doing so
I don't know, I can imagine feeling the same way and I have free (at point of use) healthcare.
It's not emergent (I assume, since we're talking about it, it's unclear if it's as serious as a fracture or not, I assume not massively painful) so I'm going to have to go to a GP, and then unless they think definitely not wait for an x-ray appointment, during which time it's probably sorted itself out and we'll find out either it wasn't a fracture or or how well it healed.
Depending where it is there may be little they could do for you anyway; even less that you wouldn't be able to do for yourself if you knew. Perhaps GP commenter is trying to keep it straight/restrict movement, let it heal - but that's annoying, if they knew it wasn't, just sore or whatever, then they wouldn't bother.
My own 'at home' wish would be for testing for levels of anything that's dietary, could then use it to have a meal deliberately high in whatever the lowest was (assuming not all high!) for example.
There are plenty of bones where the solution for a bruise, fracture, or most similar injuries is identical -- do nothing, and let it heal. That includes ribs, toes, and some other bones.
Knowing what's wrong for sure doesn't change course of action much -- not enough to warrant a visit.
Unless the bone has shifted out-of-position, the doctor will tell you to go easy on it for a few weeks, and perhaps buddy-tape a toe.
I agree diet would be awesome. The difference is the techniques I know are... intrusive. I don't quite know how an at-home blood draw would work. I do know enough that an at-home ultrasound, EKG/EEG/EMG, and several other techniques can be made cheap, practical, and harmless.
EKG/EEG/EMG can be DIYed for $10. Ultrasound, last I looked a few decades ago, would require a lot of new tech to make cheap, but nothing sci-fi grade. Developing LCD panels, integrated circuits, or e-ink were harder problems.
Tens of billions of dollars in endowment buys you a lot of PR.
On my end, I automatically apply a filter to anything I see coming out of MIT. If MIT announces nuclear fusion, I assume it's a lemon with a piece of zinc and copper behind-the-scenes, and some good old-fashioned salesmanship and grandstanding.
While on the subject of medical imaging in general there was an interesting announcement for a pill camera device with micro rotors and lighting that could be integrated into a telemedicine sensor program [1]. Probably subject to all the same false positive rabbit hole problems mentioned elsewhere regarding ultrasound stickers and not something you could use in an ems situation - but could be another way to push medical service to the edge where the costs are lower than in todays broken system.
"This research was funded, in part, by MIT, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT."
I see quite a strong military presence among the funders, which could imply this research will progress really fast and turn soon into a real thing, but sadly it also could imply it won't be available to the public for some time.
says the study’s senior author, Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT.
The study also includes lead authors Chonghe Wang and Xiaoyu Chen, and co-authors Liu Wang, Mitsutoshi Makihata, and Tao Zhao at MIT, along with Hsiao-Chuan Liu of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
It's likely all or most of the researchers were immigrants/foreign. And yet we have overly restrictive immigration policies for high skilled workers that basically means we educate them and then return them back to their country.
yeah - but it would need a whole bunch to see where the clot would pop up! But also, PE test isn't usually done with ultrasound - it's sensitivity is too low for PE. For DVT Ultrasound most tests rely on compression testing to see if there is a thrombus present that would inhibit compression of the vein.
Recent-ish advancements in tech here have made it possible to continuously measure the amount of exhaled CO2 from a patient's breath, transmit EKGs wirelessly for review by a physician in a hospital, and automatically cycle a blood pressure cuff at any interval we want. All in a patient's living room with equipment carried in one hand. In the very near future these devices will widely incorporate video laryngoscopy using their screens to assist in endotracheal intubations. Video laryngoscopes are already everywhere in the field, but they use their own screen/tablet and require extra work to get recordings out of for documentation purposes.
Ultrasound (the traditional kind - nothing like this article's stickers) is already on board some ambulances. Mostly used for locating deeper veins on people that are otherwise tough/impossible to get IV access on, checking for pneumothorax, or verifying death by confirming there's no heart wall movement.
It's not out of the realm of possibility for the cardiac monitors to gobble up the ultrasound functionality next, and incorporate that into the EKG lead stickers.