Electronics in Healthcare - Part 3

Dear Readers,

Thank you for the readership and tolerating a prolonged silence from my end! I hope you have not yet lost interest and will continue your patronage!!

First of all wishing you a very happy new year (this being my first blog in this year).

Let me continue from where I left in Nov 2007.

I happened to see a video demo of an amazing product that aids treatment to people of all ages, which uses sophisticated electronics. This is the Vein Viewer. It is based on the DaVinci platform from TI. It helps to locate veins easily and to help administer medicines intravenously. The device beams IR rays on a specific part of the body, say the hand and with a camera, detects the veins in the subcutaneous layer of the skin. It then processes this information through various algorithms and projects the image back on the hand, showing the position of the veins in real time! No more scary meddling and multiple punctures to find a vein. This is especially useful for children and senior citizens. It was an amazing product idea. I wonder why no one thought about this concept earlier!

As I had indicated earlier, personal healthcare is becoming widespread with better awareness and education. I came across couple of gadgets in that segment. These gadgets are no bigger than cell phones. They integrate such features like continuous BP monitoring, a Pedometer to indicate calories burnt during a walk, temperature, weight, body fact and such other parameters that can be monitored all the time. They help in providing a sort of bio feedback to control a rise in BP and such uses. Since these biological parameters are also stored, the complete information can also be wirelessly transmitted to the home computer for further analysis. It many not be too far away, before these gadgets integrate non invasive blood glucose measurement and non contact ECG recording. There are couple of patents in these areas already and they describe pretty interesting and innovative techniques!

Pain management is an area of concern for the medical fraternity. The range is quite big – from migraine to arthritis to cancer.  Painkillers generally are considered to give rise to lots of side effects that it is better to avoid them as much as possible. Sometimes, people will have to resort to the use of narcotic substances, especially for patients with advanced cancers. During my high school days, I had read about and seen some circuits called Electronic Sleep Inducers! I believe this technique was used by the Russians and it was even called as Electro Narcotics!! These devices work on the principle of stimulating the nerve endings with mild electrical pulses, which in turn stimulates the production of certain chemicals that ‘controls’ pain. This technique has evolved over a period of time – called Electro Stimulation – and helps pain management with minimal side effects!! With sophisticated devices and signal processing techniques available at low cost, precise control of such pulses to increase efficiency of pain management are possible now! Amazing right!

May be let’s take a break now and come back next week to look at couple of more innovations in this exciting segment, before moving onto various other topics in the subsequent weeks.

Have a great week ahead!

Padmanabhan SN