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New PDA Listens To Your Heartbeat
Roland Piquepaille writes "CardioNet Inc., a company based in San Diego, has developed a wireless technology to monitor heart patients. According to this Computerworld article, the technology was 'originally developed by Qualcomm Inc. to track and send messages to large truck fleets.' CardioNet's service is initially focused on the 2 million U.S. people suffering from arrhythmia. Each patient is equipped with a PDA-type electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device connected by a short-range wireless system to electrodes on his chest. Data is sent to his doctor via a built-in cell phone chip. More details, including a diagram and pictures showing how the system works are also available."
I happen to have arrhythmia. First note that there is wide variation in how arrhythmia affects people. For example, I'm not sure if this device would help me because my condition is not an extreme form of arrhythmia.
By itself, arrhythmia is not particularly serious; however, it can have serious secondary effects. Basically arrhythmia messes up the circulation of blood, which can lead to blood clots (because of pools of blood that aren't moving), which can lead to stroke, which is serious.
I'm currently on medication, which keeps my heart out of arrhythmia. However, it is possible that I occasionally go in and out of arrhythmia without knowing it. If I could establish that I'm not going into arrhythmia, then I could drop one of the medications I'm taking to lessen the chance of blood clots. This particular medication requires that I make periodic visits to a clinic to get the dose "calibrated."
Thus, the point of the device is to determine if the person being monitored is going in and out of arrhythmia and what kind of arrhythmia it is. Thus, in turn affects the treatment of the individual with respect to surgery, medication, etc.
No machine that exists can predict when/if a person will have a heart attack. Even a cardiac catherization that allows one to visualize the coronary arteries can't predict this... which is kinda cool.
Heart attacks usually occur when a clot forms on a previous plaque in one of the vessels feeding the heart. Logicially you would think that the tighter and bigger the plaque, the higher the risk of a clot forming and causing a heart attack. However, this is apparently not true. Often large heart attacks are caused by clots from the smaller plaques.
Of course, this article is talking about arrhythmias... not coronary artery disease. Arrhythmias can occur from ischemia but this would be likely be a very poor way to screen somebody for this disease.
Davak
Way back when I was just out of medical technology school, there was an article about the possibility of having all the lab machines hooked up to a mainframe that would control them, perhaps by the year 2000. (we had sophisticated, but pure analog eqiupment) That was just about the time Intel released the 8008, then the 8080. The first computer controlled lab equipment rolled in the door in early 1975, and by the late 1970s we were fully wired, with a network of PDP8s.
The diagnostic difficulty with cardiac arrythmias is that they are intermittent ... the chances of having one show up in the cardiologist's office is slim to none.
Then they developed the "Holter" monitor ... huge, battery operated thing that could be pushed around the wards by inpatients.
Then it was battery operated and in a fanny pack, and you wore electrodes for a few days, periodically hooking it to a special phone device to transmitted data. (similar device is/was used for high-risk pregnancies - they have a special belt to spot early labor contractions so mum-to-be can come in if needed)
Now it's continuous monitoring with something embedded that is smart enough to email the doc ... if it can make it through all that spam. There are remote embedded defibrillators. It's apparently like being kicked by a mule when it gets activated by your heart malfunctioning.