New frontier for wearables: the patch that performs the echocardiogram in real time

L’echocardiogram a non-invasive test that is very important for assessing heart health. Today this type of ultrasound is performed with traditional instrumentation, made up of ultrasound probe and signal processing system. This setup makes the exam easy to perform on subjects at restbut certainly not ideal for monitoring active subjects for an extended period of time.

The patch that does the echocardiogram is being studied

Some researchers are about to work on an interesting wearables that could revolutionize the world of ultrasound, the patch capable of real-time echocardiography throughout the course of a day. A kind of exam Holterbut with the three-dimensional reconstruction of the functioning of the heart muscle during a normal day or even during intense sporting activity.

Research published in natures and opens up interesting scenarios, having demonstrated that a simple plaster can act as a probe for heart ultrasound. As stated in the conclusions, however, we are far from the final productas there are several challenges to overcome.

At the moment the patch only acts as a probe and leverages a cable for the data transfer to the control unit. With the miniaturization of the components, the researchers aim to arrive at a real wearable system. Furthermore, for clinical use the system must grow in terms of spatial resolution. In addition, the system makes use of artificial intelligence to reconstruct the images from the data it collects, but this only works right now on subjects on which FCN-32 neural networks were trained And there isn’t yet a model that it can work on subjects generalized outside the dataset.

The concept is therefore decidedly interesting, as it would open the field to continuous monitoring through echocardiogram of subjects at riskbut also of athletes engaged in very heavy performances on the heart: there are various obstacles to overcome in order to arrive at a commercial product, but the situation could be similar to the detection systems of heartbeat or electrocardiogram on the wristwhich with the development of hardware and software have gone from trials to products on everyone’s wrist within a few years.