2023-11-20 10:45:01
Often, even in very routine visits, doctors listen to sounds from inside their patients’ bodies: the air moving in and out of the lungs, the heartbeat, and even the movement of the remains of digested food as it moves forward. through the gastrointestinal tract. These sounds provide valuable information about a person’s health. And when these sounds change subtly or are interrupted directly, they can be a sign of a serious problem that warrants urgent intervention.
Now, Jae-Young Yoo’s team at the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, United States, is introducing a new class of soft, miniaturized wearable devices that do much more than what is possible with auscultations carried out during occasional medical examinations.
Gently attached to the skin, these next-generation devices continuously track the subtle sounds of the human body’s machinery working. They do this simultaneously and wirelessly in multiple locations in almost any region of the body.
In pilot studies, the researchers tested the devices in 15 premature babies with respiratory and intestinal motility disorders and in 55 adults, 20 of them with chronic lung diseases. The devices not only performed with clinical-grade precision, but also offered new functionality that had not previously been developed or introduced into clinical research or care.
Currently, there are no methods to continuously monitor and spatially map body sounds at home or in clinical settings, notes Northwestern University’s John A. Rogers, a bioelectronics pioneer who has led the development of these new devices.
“A key advantage of this type of device is being able to simultaneously listen and compare different regions of the lungs,” says Dr. Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at Northwestern University Medical Center Network, who led the clinical research in adult subjects. “In short, it is as if up to 13 highly qualified doctors are simultaneously listening to different regions of the lungs with their stethoscopes.”
A healthcare staff member at a medical facility places portable intracorporeal sound pickup devices on a patient’s chest. In this case, what you want is to track the sounds of your lungs breathing. (Photo: Northwestern University)
These small, lightweight devices, containing pairs of digital microphones and high-performance accelerometers, gently adhere to the skin to create a comprehensive network of non-invasive sensors. By simultaneously capturing sounds and correlating them with bodily processes, the devices spatially map how air enters, passes and leaves the lungs, how heart rate changes in different states of rest and activity, and how solid, liquid and gaseous matter left after the digestion of food, it travels through the intestines.
Encapsulated in soft silicone, each device measures 40 millimeters long, 20 wide and 8 millimeters thick. Within that small volume, the device contains a flash memory drive, a battery, electronic components, components to provide Bluetooth functionality and two tiny microphones: one facing the inside of the body and the other facing the outside. By capturing sounds in both directions, an algorithm can separate external sounds (environmental or neighboring organs) from internal sounds in that area of the body.
Jae-Young Yoo and his colleagues present the technical details of the new range of medical listening devices in the academic journal Nature Medicine, under the title “Wireless broadband acousto-mechanical sensing system for continuous physiological monitoring.” (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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