At-Home Diagnostic Equipment
Some technological revolutions happen in a flash, like smartphones and AI. Others creep up slowly, like at-home medical diagnostic equipment.
Once, medical measurements required a trip to a doctor or hospital. Even then, doctors found it hard to pin down uneven heartbeats or irregular breathing if they did not occur during a visit.
Today, health trackers on our wrists can take hundreds of EKGs daily and warn doctors--and users--if there’s a problem. Pulse oximeters, digital blood pressure monitors, glucose monitors, and cholesterol tests are common. So are rapid tests for pregnancy, urinary tract infection, Covid-19, flu, HIV, and food sensitivities and allergies.
It took decades and thousands of biomedical engineers to make this happen.
Take, for example, home and continuous glucose monitors used by diabetics. They give diabetics rapid feedback on how diet, exercise, and insulin shots impact their health. Studies show their use significantly improves how patients manage their blood sugar.
The same is true for people with hypertension. A five-year study found nearly 40 percent of those who used monitors reduced their blood pressure. Those without monitors showed no change. Researchers also found that patients who monitored their pressure were more likely to take their medication and change their lifestyle to improve results.
While at-home diagnostics are common, the technology behind them is anything but. Take, for example, at-home blood pressure monitors. Doctors traditionally estimated blood pressure by listening to the sounds made by turbulent blood.
Digital monitors could not do that. So, biomedical engineers developed sensitive pressure sensors. After the pressure cuff cuts off blood flow, the sensors measure the oscillation of arteries with each heartbeat. The devices use mathematical rules to calculate the systolic and diastolic pressure based on extensive human testing.
Each at-home diagnostic has its own history of overcoming challenges, from reading oxygen with light (pulse oximeters) to developing a way around complex, multistep chemical testing (pregnancy tests).
Today, people around the world feel right at home with those biomedical engineering innovations.