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Ultrasound can tell physicians a lot about what’s going on inside your body but it’s not convenient: the equipment is big and clunky, only available in a medical office, and the technician operating the gear has to smear goo on you to make the best medium for the sound waves to travel through.
Now engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a stamp-size ultrasound sticker that can take high-resolution images of your heart, lungs, blood vessels, or other parts for as long as 48 hours – far longer than a technician will spend waving an ultrasound wand over you.
Currently, the stickers are wired to machines that record the images and data they collect and can be used in hospitals to monitor patients’ specific conditions.
However, the engineering team is working on wireless versions that would send the images to your smartphone, where an artificial intelligence could analyze what it sees.
“With a few patches on your body, you could see your internal organs,” one engineer told Science News.
The device is a thin sheet of a hydrogel sandwiched between two layers of sticky, stretchy plastic.
The hydrogel is mostly water. Encased in the plastic, it doesn’t dry out and can keep delivering images as long as the power lasts.
The bottom sticky layer adheres to skin; the top layer holds an array of tiny electronics.
The whole device is about the size of a postage stamp and three millimeters thick, not quite an eighth of an inch.
In tests, the stickers stayed in place while test subjects carried out daily activities, including biking, jogging, and lifting weights.
During the tests, the stickers delivered clear images of blood vessels changing diameter as people did different things, the stomach distending as food entered and left it, and muscles incurring microdamage as they lifted and lowered weights.
TRENDPOST: Eventually, the stickers could be available in packs you could buy at a pharmacy with a prescription, with different patches custom-designed to monitor a specific organ or condition.
The technology is another step toward not only personalized medicine, but also the expanding field of self-care and remote medicine, lowering overall health care costs and removing the inconvenience of medical appointments.