February marks
Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
While regular doctor visits and a healthy lifestyle can help lessen the risk of heart disease, a number of new technological advances will give patients and doctors alike new tools to monitor and assess cardiovascular health.
“This is a huge field that will become commonplace in the future care of patients,” Dr. Chang-Han Chen, a cardiologist and medical director of the Structural Heart Program at MemorialCare Saddleback Medical Center in California, told Medical News Today.
“We’re hopeful that we can start getting these technologies in clinical practice,” he added.
Here’s a look at five of the new technological advances for monitoring heart health.
Electrocardiography (or ECG or EKG) monitoring can offer brief, at-a-glance metrics on a person’s heart rate. In fact, if you’re wearing a smartwatch right now, you may already have this capability on your wrist.
One of the issues with wearable smart devices, though, is battery life. Continuous heart monitoring will inevitably run the power down, necessitating a recharge.
However, in the near future, this may not present a challenge.
Researchers in China are developing soft, wearable EKG devices – effectively a sensor with electrodes that can be taped directly onto the skin – that generate energy from the wearer’s movements. This means that the device will not need to be externally charged because the electrodes draw power from the body.
Dr. Shalini Prasad, a professor and department head for the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Texas Dallas, told Medical News Today that because multiple devices can be affixed to multiple areas of the body,…
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