Wearable ultrasonic sensor monitors people on the move

The work by a team from the University of California San Diego is claimed to facilitate potentially life-saving cardiovascular monitoring. Their work is detailed in the May 22, 2023 issue of Nature Biotechnology.

“This project gives a complete solution to wearable ultrasound technology—not only the wearable sensor, but also the control electronics are made in wearable form factors,” said Muyang Lin, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Nanoengineering at UC San Diego and the first author on the study. “We made a truly wearable device that can sense deep tissue vital signs wirelessly.”

The research is from the lab of Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and corresponding author of the study. 

This fully integrated autonomous wearable ultrasonic system-on-patch (USoP) is said to build on the lab’s previous work in soft ultrasonic sensor design. These soft ultrasonic sensors require tethering cables for data and power transmission, which largely constrains the user’s mobility. This work includes a small, flexible control circuit that communicates with an ultrasound transducer array to collect and transmit data wirelessly. A machine learning component helps interpret the data and track subjects in motion.