Tiny Computer Tells You When You're About to Have a Heart Attack

[Charles Kozierok]

This is pretty amazing:

A team of Swiss researchers is putting the finishing touches on a truly amazing little gadget. It's a tiny, 14-millimeter-long mini-spaceship of a device that's embedded just under your skin and held in place with an adhesive patch. The "tiny, portable personal blood testing laboratory," as the researchers describe it, then detects the data about the presence of up to five proteins and organic acids. Using Bluetooth, it then transmits that data to a nearby smartphone, essentially giving the host an unprecedented amoung of real-time information about her health. The best part? It'll cost less than a dollar.

This little skin-bourne, battery-powered gadget could save lives, and Sandro Carrara, a leader of the research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), isn't shy about that fact. "There is a molecule called troponin that is released by the heart muscle just three to four hours before the heart attack, once the heart muscle starts malfunctioning," Carrara told the Verge. "Our system could detect this molecule three/four hours in advance of the fatal event." So that imaginary future, where you get a push notification a few hours before your heart stops beating, that's entirely possible.

Welcome to the futuristic world of digital medicine, where disease goes to get its ass kicked by nanotechnology.

Wonder how long it will take until conspiracy theorists start suggesting that devices like this are just a cover for the government to track our movements or something?

 

[CycloWizard]

Wonder how long it will take until governments actually start using devices like this to track our movements. The technology already exists so it's entirely possible that they already do. It's not very speculative to make such a claim when A) it's technically feasible, B) the SCOTUS already rejected similar tracking measures without a warrant, yet C) the executive branch decided it could do it anyway.

That said, there are plenty of legitimate uses for such devices in the medical arena and many of them are now being realized after a long slog through the FDA.

 

[RearAdmiral]

Retail price the govt will pay?? 10k? This would be pretty sweet with implementation in a life-alert system.

 

[Mo0o]

I'm not sure the data in this article is accurate. Troponin does not rise until there is already ACTIVE myocardial damage. So it should not rise until you're already having your heart attack. Not only that, troponins often do not rise until several hours AFTER the event (not BEFORE, as the article states). Physicians often diagnose heart attacks without a rise in the troponin because of this fact.

This would be akin to someone invoking a fire alarm that "detects smoke several hours before the start of the fire." Clearly that makes no sense. While this device might get people who are having a silent heart attack into a hospital sooner, it would not detect an impending heart attack and stop it before any damage has been done.