Blood flow monitored with stretchable ultrasound patch

The new ultrasound patch developed at the University of California San Diego can continuously monitor blood flow, blood pressure and heart function in real time. Wearing such a device could make it easier to identify the onset of cardiovascular problems.

A team led by Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, reported the patch in a paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The patch, which can be worn on the neck or chest, can accurately and non-invasively sense and measure cardiovascular signals as deep as 14cm inside the body.

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"This type of wearable device can give you a more comprehensive, more accurate picture of what's going on in deep tissues and critical organs like the heart and the brain, all from the surface of the skin," Xu said in a statement.

"Sensing signals at such depths is extremely challenging for wearable electronics. Yet, this is where the body's most critical signals and the central organs are buried," said Chonghe Wang, a former nanoengineering graduate student in Xu's lab and co-first author of the study. "We engineered a wearable device that can penetrate such deep tissue depths and sense those vital signals far beneath the skin. This technology can provide new insights for the field of healthcare."