A recent flexible, wearable medical device could provide a serious boost within the fight against heart disease, the leading reason behind death in the USA.
A team led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed an ultrathin, lightweight electronic tattoo, or e-tattoo, that attaches to the chest for continuous, mobile heart monitoring outside of a clinical setting. It includes two sensors that together provide a transparent picture of heart health, giving clinicians a greater probability to catch red flags for heart disease early.
Most heart conditions will not be very obvious. The damage is being done within the background and we do not even understand it. If we are able to have continuous, mobile monitoring at home, then we are able to do early diagnosis and treatment, and if that could be done, 80% of heart disease could be prevented.”
Nanshu Lu, professor within the Department of Aerospace and Engineering Mechanics and lead creator of the study
The study is published in Advanced Electronic Materials.
As a continuation of an earlier chest e-tattoo project, this new edition is wireless and mobile, which is enabled by a series of small energetic circuits and sensors rigorously arranged and linked by stretchable interconnections and conforms to the chest via a medical dressing. The clear devices are far less intrusive than other monitoring systems and more comfortable for patients.
Currently, there is not a ready solution for long-term, comfortable monitoring outside of the clinical setting. Clinicians can run tests on patients after they visit, but they might not catch some heart issues because signs of disease will not be present at that moment.
The e-tattoo weighs only 2.5 grams and runs on a battery the scale of a penny. The battery has a lifetime of greater than 40 hours and may easily be modified by the user.
It provides two key heart measurements. The electrocardiogram, or ECG, is the electrical signal from the guts. And the seismocardiogram, or SCG, is the acoustic signal from the guts that comes from the guts valves.
ECG could be measured by mobile devices reminiscent of an Apple Watch. And the SCG could be monitored via stethoscope. But there isn’t a mobile solution that approximates a stethoscope or takes each measurements.
“Those two measurements, electrical and mechanical, together can provide a far more comprehensive and complete picture of what is happening with the guts,” Lu said. “There are numerous more heart characteristics that might be extracted out of the 2 synchronously measured signals in a noninvasive manner.”
Monitoring those two aspects, and synchronizing them, makes it possible to measure cardiac time intervals, that are a serious indicator of heart disease and other problems.
The researchers have already tested the device on five healthy patients of their day-to-day environments, with a low error rate in measurements compared with currently available monitoring options. The following step involves further testing and validating the initial results and expanding to various kinds of patients.
This project rose out of a multi-university partnership of researchers who were awarded a grant in 2021 from the National Science Foundation’s ASCENT program to review chest e-tattoo technology. Lu and her team have refined and adapted the e-tattoo technology to measure multiple parts of the body through the years, reminiscent of the palm, and different conditions, like pneumonia.
The project team is Sarnab Bhattacharya and Philip Tan of the Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Alec Alden of the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Sangjun Kim of the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering; Hirofumi Tanaka, Edward Coyle, Jieting Wang and Taha Alhalimi of the College of Education’s Department of Kinesiology and Health Education; Mohammad Nikbakht and Omer Inan of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Pulin Wang of Austin company Stretch Med Inc.; and Animesh Tandon of Cleveland Clinic Kid’s Pediatric Institute.
Source:
University of Texas at Austin
Journal reference:
Bhattacharya, S., et al. (2023). A Chest‐Conformable, Wireless Electro‐Mechanical E‐Tattoo for Measuring Multiple Cardiac Time Intervals. Advanced Electronic Materials. doi.org/10.1002/aelm.202201284.