Scientists have created a wearable ultrasound patch that can continuously monitor babies in the womb, with the hope that such devices could aid the early detection of complications during pregnancy.<\/p>\n
The team behind the work say ultrasound-based techniques in place now have drawbacks: continuous monitoring of the baby\u2019s heart rate and contractions of the womb using current methods leads to a high rate of false alarms, while the use of more conventional handheld devices for imaging is limited to a small number of scans during pregnancy, and must be carried out by a skilled operator.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurrent diagnosis devices are intermittent that can only capture a snapshot of what\u2019s going on with the baby,\u201d said Prof Sheng Xu of Stanford University, a senior author of the work. \u201cThe patients can only do such measurements in the hospital. They miss a lot of information and data between the hospital visits.\u201d<\/p>\n
By contrast, Xu said, a wearable device can capture what is happening continuously, anywhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t miss any data, so that you can identify the baseline of the signals of each individual patient, analyse the change and pattern of these signals,\u201d he said, which can lead to a unique diagnose or set of interventions.<\/p>\n
Xu and his colleagues have created a wearable ultrasound patch that can be used for hours at a time to continuously image the foetus in the womb and track its blood flow in real time \u2013 including in moving structures such as the umbilical cord.<\/p>\n
Although it is at present a proof-of-concept device that is tethered to external electronics and requires traditional ultrasound for initial placement, the team say the technology \u2013 called UPatch \u2013 is the first of its type.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis paper marks a very important step [that] demonstrates how practically something like this can be done,\u201d said Dr Antoniya Georgieva, a senior author of the study from the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n