Heart attack: Experts claim a vegan diet can 'help prevent' them
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A research team at UC San Diego, developed a soft and stretchy ultrasound patch that can work to monitor blood flow through major arteries and provide a warning for strokes and heart attacks.
The new ultrasound patch, monitors blood flow, making it easier to identify cardiovascular problems early on.
Knowing how much blood flows though a patient’s blood vessels at any given moment can help clinicians diagnose various cardiovascular condition, including heart valve problems, poor circulation in the limbs or blockages in the arteries that could lead to heart attacks.
The innovative piece of engineering can be tilted at different angles and be steered to different areas of the body that are not directly under the patch.
Sheng Xu, who led the study, said: “This type of wearable device can give a more comprehensive, more accurate picture of what’s going on in deep tissues and critical organs like the heart and the brain, all from the surface of the skin.”
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How it works
The patch is made up of a thin sheet of flexible, stretchable polymer that adheres to the skin.
Numerous millimetre-sized transducers, each individually controlled by a computer, are embedded on the patch.
There are two ways in which the patch can operate. In one mode, all the transducers can be synchronised to transmit ultrasound waves together, focussing on one spot as deep as 14 centimetres in the body.
In the other mode, the transducers can be programmed to transmit out of sync, which produces ultrasound beams that can be stirred to different angles.
Xu explains: “This is a first in the field of wearable electronics because existing wearable sensors typically only monitor areas right below them.
“If you want want to sense signals at a different position, you have to move the sensor to that location.
“With this patch, we can probe areas that are wider than the device’s footprint. This can open up a lot of opportunities.”
Chonghe Wang, a former nano-engineering graduate studying in Xu’s lab, said: “Sensing signals at such depths is extremely challenging for wearable electronics. Yet, this is where the body’s most critical signals and the central organs are buried.
“We engineered a wearable device that can penetrate such deep tissue depths and sense those vital signals far beneath the skin.
“This technology can provide new insights for the field of healthcare.”
Strokes cause around 34,000 deaths in the UK each year and are the biggest cause of disability in the UK.
There are more than 100,000 hospital admissions each year due to heart attacks, which equates to one every five minutes.
According to the British Heart Foundation, symptoms of a heart attack include:
Pain or discomfort in the chest that happens suddenly and doesn’t go away.
Pain that spreads to the left or right arm, to the neck, jaw, back or stomach. For some people the pain or tightness is severe, which for others it’s uncomfortable.
Feeling sick, sweaty, light-headed or short of breath.
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