Oct 14 2010
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are advancing an economical imager to mimic a remote stethoscope that can monitor the patient’s pulse without touching the body.
Ming-Zher Poh, a Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology graduate student along with his co-workers developed a method to detect even the minute fluctuations in the pulse of the patient in such a manner that the light gets scattered from the face when the blood flows underneath the skin. This inventive research has been explained in Optics Express in the journal’s May issue.
According to Poh, the researchers are recently exploring and filtering out various other measurement parameters such as respiration rate, oxygen saturation and blood pressure.
This invention can be deployed in numerous situations where invasive or other sensor integration techniques are problematic. Poh added that such applications find vast utility of this new technology and can range from evaluating the major signs of victims who are burnt to infants.
This technology can also be deployed in telemedicine for checking the patients by video chatting .