This decade, if you want somebody to give you a bucket of money, throw
the phrase "smart phone" into your pitch.
Of course, the big boys have sunk far more than $10 mil into this, but
perhaps this will shake loose some new ideas.
The holy grail of portable diagnostics is called "CNIBP", for
Continuous Non Invasive Blood Pressure. There's simply no way to
continuously, non-invasively monitor a person's blood pressure with
any accuracy. I've always found that fascinating, and use it in my
instrumentation talks, to drive home the point that it's sometimes
hard to tell how difficult a measurement problem will be. We can
measure the distance to the moon with an accuracy of 1mm. I can
measure your blood oxygen to better than a percent by shining light
through your skin, but I can't tell your blood pressure without
clamping on something uncomfortable and restrictive, and even then, my
accuracy will be 10% at best.
-Jim MacA.
Hi,
What about using 3d ultrasound to image the heart and then also
listening to it acoustically? I'm not saying this would work to
determine blood pressure, but I know there is a lot of unused data in
simple measurements that could theoretically be used. A lot of blood
pressure depedent data will go into the ultrasound ADC's and the
acoustic ADC, the tricky part is trying to figure out how to separate
this from all the other variables that make up the 3D shape and sound of
the heart. Ideally a simple measurement device would quantify as many
variables as possible, that is the interesting part to figure out how to
do that. I think a simple 1kV pulsed spark gap with good measurement
circuitry could theoretically be used as a mass spectrometer with enough
effort or also many other things!
cheers,
Jamie
