Body Organs Can Send Status Updates For your Cellphone [Video]

Currently, if a cardiac patient’s heart rate gets too high the implanted defibrillator in their chest gives them a friendly remedial shock to bypass a heart attack. But which could soon change-by giving hearts their own IP addresses.

Dutch research organisation IMEC , based in Eindhoven, this week demonstrated a new form of wireless body area network (BAN). Dubbed the Human++ BAN platform, the system converts IMEC’s ultra-low-power electrocardiogram sensors into wireless nodes in a quick-range network, transmitting physiological data to a hub – the patient’s cellphone. From there, the readings will also be forwarded to doctors via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. They could also be displayed on the phone or sound an alarm when things are about to head wrong, giving patients like me an opportunity to aim to slow our heart rates and avoid an unnecessary shock.

Julien Penders, who developed the system, says it might also work with other low-power medical sensors, akin to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to observe neurological conditions or electromyograms to detect neuromuscular diseases. Besides helping those already diagnosed with chronic conditions, BANs would be used by people liable to developing medical problems – the so-called ” worried well” – or by fitness enthusiasts and athletes who wish to keep tabs on their physiological processes during training.

Tied to an Android

IMEC’s technology is not the first BAN , but integrates better than earlier versions with the gadgets that many folks carry around with them. IMEC has created a dongle that plugs into the conventional SD memory card interface of a cellphone to stream data from the sensors in real time and allow the phone to reconfigure the sampling frequency of sensors on the fly. The associated software runs on Google’s Android cellphone operating system.

However, IMEC has eschewed common short-range wireless standards along with Bluetooth in favour of the so-called nRF24L01+ radio designed by Nordic Semiconductor in Oslo, Norway. ” The difficulty with Bluetooth is that it’ll increase the flexibility consumption on the sensor side,” says Penders. Using the Nordic system, IMEC’s sensors can run continuously, transmitting every 100 milliseconds, for up to seven days between recharges – a Bluetooth system would barely last a day, Penders says.

In the current design, the ECG electrodes are connected to a small necklace that contains the transmitter and battery. The next move might be to exploit an ultra-low-power radio transmitter, still in development at IMEC, to improve the stamina and portability of the sensors.

With around 18 million people inside the UK living with chronic disease, ” telehealth” monitoring like here is the way in which things are going, says Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation . Devices already exist that permit people with pacemakers and defibrillators to send telemetry from their implants via a landline to doctors. But using cell phones often is the natural next step, he says.

Penders presented the work at the Wireless Health Conference in San Diego, California, this week.

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This post is tagged: chronic conditions, fitness enthusiasts, neurological conditions, neuromuscular diseases, physiological processes, research organisation, sampling frequency