Revolutionizing medicine, one chip at a time. In the past several decades, microchips have transformed consumer electronics, enabling new products from digital watches and pocket-sized calculators to laptop computers and digital music players. The next wave of this electronics revolution will involve biomedical devices, say electrical engineers in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) who are working on tiny, low-power chips that could diagnose heart problems, monitor patients with Parkinson’s disease or predict seizures in epileptic patients.
Such wearable or implantable devices could transform the way medicine is practiced and help cut the costs of expensive diagnostic tests, says Dennis Buss, former vice president of silicon technology development at Texas Instruments. “Microelectronics have the potential to reduce the cost of health care in the same way they reduced the costs of computing in the 1980s and communications in the 1990s,” says Buss, a visiting scientist at MIT. Beating hearts New directions. 18-549 Embedded Systems Design | Wearable ECG System. Chris Hoffman Ryan Kellogg Mike Zizza The goal of this project is to build a wearable ECG monitor that fits comfortably into daily living. The system integrates electrodes and an embedded microcontroller into a shirt and sends cardiac signal data over bluetooth to a smartphone or PDA where it is processed in real-time to detect cardiac events and issue warnings to the user.
Existing ECG monitoring solutions are not suitable for sustained wear during daily activities due to uncomfortable electrodes and cumbersome wires, short battery life, bulky design, and the requirement that data must be taken to a doctor's office for processing. Our wearable ECG device will enable cardiac patients of all types to easily monitor their heart for irregularities or warning signs, store and send cardiac data to their physician, and detect problems early for better health. Functional: Measure ECG and store relative data Process ECG data and determine location of QRS complex. Reliability Eye Candy In Lab. MIT Engineers Design Wearable ECG Monitor. Beating hearts The key to developing small wearable and implantable medical monitors is an ultra-low-power chip for interfacing to biomedical sensors, signal processing, energy processing and communications, developed by the research group of MTL Director Anantha Chandrakasan. Ultimately, Sodini and others at MTL hope to use that chip as the core of a device that can monitor a range of vital signs — heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, pulse oxygenation and temperature.
For now, they’re starting with a monitor that measures and records electrocardiograms (ECGs). An unobtrusive, comfortable ECG monitor that patients could wear as they go about their normal lives might offer a doctors a more thorough picture of heart health than the lab tests now used, says Collin Stultz, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and health sciences and technology and a cardiologist working on the project. In India, for India: medical device makers plug in. Breast cancer - suspected - The Map of Medicine - England & Wales. Welcome to the Map of Medicine - England & Wales. Map of Medicine - Map of Medicine. Health Information Systems Improve Healthcare in Developing Regions -> Cisco News.
Dr. Peter Drury discusses how ICT brings connectivity and collaboration to healthcare in emerging regions February 22, 2010 Information and communications technology (ICT) holds enormous promise for tackling some of the challenges facing healthcare professionals in developing regions. Many medical facilities in the world's most rural areas still do not have computers; even fewer enjoy Internet connectivity.
But as ICT spreads across remote communities, its potential benefits are dramatic. Imagine clinicians in remote towns gaining access to e-learning opportunities and the chance to confer on diagnoses – or specialists from a particular region being able to discuss and collaborate on treatment for an outbreak of cholera or tuberculosis (TB). Dr. News@Cisco asked Dr. Where does the health information system stand in emerging nations, generally speaking? Peter Drury: There really isn't one health information system.
Can you expand on the idea of knowledge support? — Dr.