Experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently developed an ingestible sensor which allows doctors to monitor the vital signs of patients.
MIT News reported that the new sensor can be swallowed by patients to let doctors watch their heart rate and breathing rate from inside their gastrointestinal (GI) tract. Trauma patients, soldiers, athletes and those with chronic ailments can all be monitored accurately and consistently by the device.
The new sensor works by computing breathing rate and heart rate based on unique sound waves made by heartbeats and the lungs expanding and exhaling. The creators were inspired by how ingestible devices could measure body temperature, so they came up with a sensor design that can track temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate. At first, the researchers made a very small stethoscope that patients can swallow. Signal processing systems were also developed to translate the acoustic information into vital signs. The sensor has about the same size as a multivitamin pill and includes a small microphone housed inside a silicone capsule. There is an electronic system that processes the sound and forwards radio signals to an external receiver, Wired reported.
The device was expected to stay inside the person’s digestive tract for only one to two days. If some patients needed monitoring for a longer period, they will have to swallow more sensors. For soldiers, the monitoring capsules have application to ensure that they are not prone to dehydration, fatigue, shock and increased heart rate. A temperature sensor can also be ingested to detect fever, infection and extreme body temperatures.
“Through characterization of the acoustic wave, recorded from different parts of the GI tract, we found that we could measure both heart rate and respiratory rate with good accuracy.” stated Giovanni Traverso, a research affiliate at Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Traverso was a co-author of the study, while Gregory Ciccarelli, an associate staff member of the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, was the lead author. Other senior authors of the study are Robert Langer, a member and professor of the David H. Koch Institute at MIT and Albert Swiston, a technical staff member at Lincoln Laboratory.
The experts plan to create sensors that can track heart conditions and breathing issues next.
The findings of the study were published in the online journal PLOS One, on Nov. 18, 2015.
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