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Cardiac people are notoriously uncomfortable to monitor their health. In fact, 45% of all patients discharged from the hospital with congestive heart failure are readmitted to the hospital within 90 days.
This is a problem not only for the quality of life of cardiac patients, but also because Medicare and Medicaid penalize hospitals when patients are readmitted too quickly after discharge. To tackle the problem, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have found a way to integrate sensors into an object that everyone interacts with several times a day and can passively monitor heart health while not requiring anything other than to sit down.
The next frontier in heart health is: a toilet seat.
"Even the most well-intentioned patients will not measure their blood pressure every day," says Nicholas Conn, an engineer at Rochester Institute of Technology and CEO of Heart Health Intelligence. In order to find the easiest way to monitor the health of patients without their contribution, the RIT development team asked the following question: "What can we do to integrate technology into life? daily? A computer, a mouse, a steering wheel in the car? What do people use every day? "
The most obvious answer was the toilet seat: it makes direct contact with the skin (which facilitates monitoring) and everyone uses it.
The resulting toilet seat monitor contains all the tools necessary to detect the deterioration of the health of a heart patient. The seat has three main instruments: an electrocardiogram, which uses electrodes on the surface of the seat to measure the electrical activity of the heart; a photoplethysmogram, the same sensor as in a FitBit, which measures the patient's heart rate; and a balistocardiogram, which detects the patient's weight and, depending on its fluctuations as the heart beats, determines how much blood passes through the heart. (It works because the heart builds up enough pressure to exert physical pressure on the body.) The RIT team was the first to demonstrate that a ballistocardiogram could be used to calculate the blood volume passing through the heart. )
The instruments are sensitive enough that the team believes that patients would only need to sit on the seat for approximately 90 seconds to get a full measurement. And they even designed their algorithms to recognize whether the patient is at rest or under pressure, because stool and urination can actually cause huge changes in heart rate, blood pressure and breathing. "Part of our innovation lies in the fact that we have algorithms that allow us to identify the patient's physiological state. Are they at rest or at the effort? We reject sections where they are not at their basic level, "explains Conn.
Although Conn states that he can envision a future in which the toilet seat will be commercially available and accessible to all, his company is currently focusing on its development for medical applications. The final version of the seat will have a built-in battery that will last up to six years and will likely use cellular connection technology, so the only configuration or interaction that a patient will have to do is to install it just like an ordinary toilet. seat.
Implantable cardiac monitoring medical devices, offering a similar service, can cost up to $ 40,000. Conn estimates that they will be able to charge only $ 100 per month for their toilet seat, which would include all the necessary monitoring services. This opens passive cardiac monitoring to a much larger group of patients and could potentially change many lives. For this reason, the company is working on FDA approval and expects it to be available by the end of 2021 or early 2022.
"In reality, our goal is to reduce the cost of care and improve the quality of life for patients," he said, noting that congestive heart failure was not a curable condition. "With the average life of a patient with heart failure, 50% will die in five years. Its prognosis is worse than that of many forms of cancer. It is a terminal illness. Are you going to be in the hospital or at home? We hope to keep people at home and improve their quality of life. "
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