Drones are to be evaluated in the UK for delivering defibrillators to people experiencing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). The University of Surrey is running the study, with Air Ambulance Charity Kent Surrey Sussex (‘KSS’), and South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust. “With survival rates for OHCA in the UK currently below 10%, a key challenge is the delay ...
A simple non-contact camera technique has been used to analyse blood lipid levels after someone eats high-fat and low-fat meals, and agrees well with blood sample based measurements. Spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) is the technique, where a light source obliquely illuminates the surface to be analysed and the camera take a perpendicular view. In this case, the surface was ...
A team of engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst set themselves the task instrumenting cardiac tissue as it is grown outside the body to study heart disease. Artists impression over photo: “Cardiac tissue is very special,” said Jun Yao of UMass Amherst’s college of engineering. “It has a mechanical activity – contractions and relaxations that pump blood through our ...
An intelligent patch for cardiac monitoring is amongst research projects built on flexible and stretchable PCBs from Würth Elektronik. There are two cardiac monitors, a mini version with three electrodes for short-term monitoring, and one with six electrodes for longer periods. “A completely new approach to integration was developed in this work,” according to Wurth. “It was based on a stretchable ...
Analog Devices is aiming at wearable patient monitoring devices with an analogue front-end for four vital signs: electrocardiogram, heart rate, blood-oxygen saturation and respiration rate. The chip, MAX86178, does this with three channels, one each for: photodiodes (optical PPG for blood oxygen and heart rate), voltages (electrocardiogram (‘ECG’ or ‘EKG’) and alternative heart rate) and bio-impedance (‘bio-z’ for respiration rate) Optical ...
Russian and US scientists have used machine learning to find ‘atrial fibrillation (AF) drivers’ – small patches of faulty heart muscle that can cause cardiac arrhythmia. The team tested their approach on 11 donated human hearts and located AF drivers with an accuracy of up to 81%. Multi-electrode mapping (MEM) is a technique that can be applied during an operation, ...
Electrocardiograph and seismocardiograph readings can be taken simultaneously by an e-tattoo, according to the University of Texas at Austin – seismocardiography (SCG) is a measure of chest vibrations associated with heartbeats. “We can get much greater insight into heart health by the synchronous collection of data from both sources,” said Austin engineer Nanshu Lu. The active part is a serpentine mesh ...
Artificial intelligence can recognise congestive heart failure non-invasively via by a cloud-connected phone, briging diagnosis into the home, according to a research team from Nanyang Technological University and Tan Tock Seng Hospital, both of Singapore. One in five people worldwide, according to Nanyang, run the risk of developing congestive heart failure – and this increases with age. There is no cure, and ...
Drones can be used to detect human vital signs from a distance, according to the University of South Australia.
AMS has launched an optical heart rate sensor for wrist wearables. Called AS7000, it measures heart rate by shining light into blood vessels, which expand and contract as blood pulses through them, and analysing scattered reflections – which is called photoplethysmography (PPG). In a 6.1 x 4.1 x 1mm package, the device include two green LEDs and a photo-sensing signal processing ...
