The Apple Watch has become a serious medical monitor.  It will now be able to detect falls, contact emergency responders, and diagnose  irregularities in heart rhythm and blood pressure.  Its ECG app has been granted a De Novo classification by the FDA. ECG readings are taken from the wrist, using electrodes built into the Digital Crown and an electrical heart rate sensor in the back crystal. Users touch the Digital Crown and receive a heart rhythm classification in 30 seconds. It can classify if the heart is beating in a normal pattern or whether there are signs ..read more

Rutgers scientists Mehdi Javanmard and Abbas Furniturewalla have developed a wrist wearable that can count particles, including blood cells, bacteria, and organic or inorganic air particles. Red blood cell counts can indicate internal bleeding. High or low white blood cell counts can indicate cancers, such as leukemia, or other illnesses. The plastic wristband includes a flexible circuit board and a thin biosensor with a channel, or pipe, with embedded gold electrodes. A circuit processes electrical signals, and a micro-controller digitizes data, which is transmitted via bluetooth. B ..read more

Georgia Tech’s Woon-Hong Yeo has  developed a proof of concept, flexible, stretchable sensor that can continuously monitor hemodynamicswhen integrated with a stent like flow diverter after a brain aneurysm. Blood flow is measured using  capacitance changes. According to Pittsburgh professor Youngjae Chun, who collaborated with Yeo, “We have developed a highly stretchable, hyper-elastic flow diverter using a highly-porous thin film nitinol,” Chun explained. “None of the existing flow diverters, however, provide quantitative, real-time monitoring of hemodynamics within t ..read more

Microsoft’s Glabellaglasses, developed by Christian Holz and Edward Wang, will have integrated optical sensors that take pulse wave readings from three areas around the face, according to their recently granted patent. Blood pressure is calculated by measuring the time between when blood is ejected from the heart and reaches the face. The researchers believe that the device can unobtrusively and continuously measure blood pressure ..read more

Stanford’s Alberto Salleohas created a  patch that continuously monitors cortisol levels in sweat.  Potential uses include sports performance measurement, early disease detection, adrenal and pituitary gland monitoring, and evaluating the emotional state of young or non verbal patients. Cortisol influences emotional stress, blood pressure, metabolism, immune response and and memory formation. The stretchy, rectangular sensor is wrapped around a membrane that specifically binds only to cortisol. It absorbs sweat through holes in the bottom. Sweat pools in a reservoir, topped by the co ..read more

Acoustic sensors are increasingly used in monitoring fetal health. Imperial College’s Niamh Nowlan is using low cost, non-transmitting accelerometers and acoustic sensors to continuously track fetal movementto understand skeletal development. Acoustic sensors enable discrimination between the movement of the fetus and mother. Israel’s Nuvo Groupis continuously monitoring fetal cardiac activity using acoustic sensors and ECG (to track both sound and electrical activity) in a wearable baby belt ..read more

Cambridge’s Anna-Maria Pappa, KAUST’s Sahika Inal, and colleagues have developed a low cost, molecular wired sensor that can measure metabolites in sweat, tears, saliva or blood.  It can be incorporated into flexible and stretchable substrates for cellular-level health monitoring. A synthesised polymer acts as a molecular wire, accepting electrons produced during electrochemical reactions. It merges with sweat, tears or blood, absorbing ions and swelling, leading to high sensitivity.  The signal can be amplified when incorporated into complex circuits, responding to tiny fluctuations ..read more

Myant‘s Tony Chahine reimagined human presence at ApplySci’s recent Wearable Tech + Digital Health + Neurotech conference at Stanford ..read more

The Apple Watch has become a serious medical monitor.  It will now be able to detect falls, contact emergency responders, and diagnose  irregularities in heart rhythm and blood pressure.  Its ECG app has been granted a De Novo classification by the FDA. ECG readings are taken from the wrist, using electrodes built into the Digital Crown and an electrical heart rate sensor in the back crystal. Users touch the Digital Crown and receive a heart rhythm classification in 30 seconds. It can classify if the heart is beating in a normal pattern or whether there are signs ..read more

Helen Schwerdt, Ann Graybiel, Michael Cima, Bob Langer, and MIT colleagues have developed and implantable sensor that can measure dopamine in the brain of rodents for more than one year.  They believe that this can inform the treatment and understanding of Parkinson’s and other brain diseases. According to Graybiel, “Despite all that is known about dopamine as a crucial signaling molecule in the brain, implicated in neurologic and neuropsychiatric conditions as well as our abilty to learn, it has been impossible to monitor changes in the online release of dopamine over time periods long ..read more