Monitoring the Heart without Missing a Beat

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Many hospitals have started installing wireless EKG patient-tracking systems, says Gyselinckx, as a way of keeping tabs on their patients and locating them if they get into trouble. But such systems amount to little more than Holter monitors hooked up to a central hospital tracking system that monitors the patients' whereabouts and EKGs.

The IMEC device does have limitations: in its current form, it can't record as much of the heart's electrical activity as a clinical EKG can. "It doesn't give you an overall picture of the heart--only a snapshot," Kingsley says.

Even so, it is still very useful because it allows all arrhythmic events to be detected, says Hans Stromeyer, chief medical officer of Monebo, in Austin, TX, which has developed a wireless EKG device that is worn like a belt. "And continuous monitoring can pick up events that the patient will not be aware of," he says. This has huge potential in preventative medicine because it can help doctors detect and treat serious heart conditions before they progress and cause irreparable damage.

Indeed, the IMEC team is developing the heart patch as part of a larger project, called Human++, aimed at designing telemedicine technologies for preventative health. Continuously monitoring the vital signs of otherwise healthy people in the general population could make it possible for doctors to preempt a variety of serious illnesses through early detection, Gyselinckx says.

Wireless home-based monitoring and diagnosis is already beginning to happen, says Stromeyer. It has demonstrated its usefulness in long-term recovery and is much cheaper than hospital rehabilitation.

There is also a lot of interest in using portable heart monitors to assist in drug trials. This is because one section of the EKG trace, known as the QT segment, has been shown to be a good indicator of changes in heart activity caused by drug toxicity, says Stromeyer. Highly portable monitors such as the IMEC device could be particularly useful in such an application.

But for now the IMEC team is working to enable the device to record as much data as a clinical EKG can. The team is also working to make the patch more pliable with a combination of flexible organic electronics and thin-film silicon electronics, with the aim of licensing the technology.