Ultrasound stickers could continuously image internal organs for days

The person is Jeremy Hsu.

For 48 hours, a patch the size of a postage stamp stuck to your skin can give you continuousechocardiography of internal organs. The human heart can change shape during exercise, and the stomach can expand and shrink when a person eats or drinks.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there is a sign that says "Welcome to the era of Wearable Positron Emission Tomography"

Wearable devices made of flexible materials are being developed. It's difficult to create flexible devices that stay on the skin for more than a few hours while also allowing high-resolutionechocardiography.

Combining a rigid transducer component with a soft, sticky patch was used to solve that problem. The patch has a layer of water-based hydrogel sandwiched between two layers of flexible rubber material to prevent it from degrading.

The team put stickers on the arm, neck, chest, and waist of 15 volunteers who drank juice, lifted weights, and rode their bikes in the lab. The changes in the size and shape of the lungs, heart, stomach, and major arteries and veins can be seen from the stickers.

There is still a long way to go before the stickers can be used for medical monitoring. It isn't a fully portable system because the stickers have to be connected by wires to a computer and translate the waves into images.

There are already point-of-care devices with a data acquisition system that is small. He's confident that the computing component can be miniaturised and integrated with the sticker to become a portable and wireless system.

The University of Texas at Austin is working on a device that will allow for a closer look at the body.

Medical companies are already working to miniaturise the computing components used with handheld probes.

Hospitals can use the stickers to monitor patients without requiring human technicians to hold probes, and they could be useful in situations where technicians are not always available. Philip Tan is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. It could be put to use in low-resource communities.

In the future, such stickers could help monitor the lungs of covid-19 patients at home, keep an eye on people managing cardiovascular disease, and even provide continuous monitoring for a fetus growing in the womb. The team will study any potential side effects from long-term exposure to the low power waves.

The journal's title is "science."

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