The common stethoscope’s recognizable design has remained largely unchanged for decades for good reason—there’s really not much to improve at this point. When it comes to listening in on a patient’s internal soundtrack, the standard, adjustable bell connected via short rubber tubing to binaural earpieces is perfectly suited for helping assess respiratory and cardiac health.
Of course, a stethoscope can only relay vitals in person based on its specific placements; long term monitoring often requires extended clinical stays alongside bulky, wired devices. To solve these problems, a team of medical experts, researchers, and engineers at Northwestern University set out to design a new wearable capable of providing highly detailed, continuous, real-time information regardless of a patient’s environment. After painlessly adhering to specific areas of the chest, the resulting soft devices not only accomplish these goals, but already show immense promise for both adults, as well as premature babies often dealing with gastrointestinal complications and apneas.
[Related: Pill cuts lung cancer deaths in half, study says.]
“Currently, there are no existing methods for continuously monitoring and spatially mapping body sounds at home or in hospital settings,” John Rogers, a bioelectronics expert who oversaw the new tool’s design and development, said in a recent Northwestern University profile.
As detailed in a new study published in Nature Medicine, Rogers and fellow researchers placed a miniature battery, electronics, Bluetooth relay, flash memory drive, and two microphones within a 40mm long, 20mm wide, and 8 mm thick soft silicone casing—roughly the size of a stick of gum. Each microphone is positioned in opposing directions, into and outside the patient, to filter exterior ambient noises from a wearer’s bodily sounds. The team notes this is particularly helpful in situations such as lung monitoring, since the organ is simply…
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