Browse Topic: Cardiovascular system
Scientists used a “smart” shirt equipped with an electrocardiogram to track participants’ heart-rate recovery after exercise and developed a tool for analyzing the data to predict those at higher or lower risk of heart-related ailments.
This study introduces a novel in-cabin health monitoring system leveraging Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar technology for real-time, contactless detection of occupants' vital signs within automotive environments. By capturing micro-movements associated with cardiac and respiratory activities, the system enables continuous monitoring without physical contact, addressing the need for unobtrusive vehicle health assessment. The system architecture integrates edge computing capabilities within the vehicle's head unit, facilitating immediate data processing and reducing latency. Processed data is securely transmitted via HTTPS to a cloud-based backend through an API Gateway, which orchestrates data validation and routing to a machine learning pipeline. This pipeline employs supervised classifiers, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Random Forest (RF) to analyze features such as temporal heartbeat variability, respiration rate stability, and heart rate. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the system's proficiency in classifying occupant states, including normal, distressed, and unconscious conditions, achieving high prediction accuracy with low false positive rates. Notably, the system attains sub-10-second detection latency and facilitates end-to-end response actions within a 5-minute window. Experimental deployment in a Mercedes vehicle demonstrated high accuracy in occupancy detection (97%), vital sign monitoring (94%), and full ERS (Emergency Response System) activation within five minutes, meeting Euro NCAP 2025+ Child Presence Detection (CPD) requirements. Furthermore, the cloud infrastructure supports the accumulation of health data, contributing to personalized driver profiles and informed decision-making for future interventions. This research underscores the potential of UWB radar technology in augmenting automotive safety through real-time health monitoring, paving the way for smarter and more secure vehicular environments.
EPFL researchers have invented a remarkably small and ultraflexible neurovascular microcatheter. Powered by blood flow, it can safely navigate the most intricately branched arteries in a matter of seconds.
ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland
Researchers have developed a handheld device that could potentially replace stethoscopes as a tool for detecting certain types of heart disease.
A wearable wristband could significantly improve diabetes management by continuously tracking not only glucose but also other chemical and cardiovascular signals that influence disease progression and overall health.
Researchers have created a groundbreaking prototype for a new kind of leadless pacemaker designed for both children and adults. The innovative micropacemaker would be the first fully leadless system to be placed in the pericardial space surrounding the heart. That would allow the device to be implanted in a minimally invasive way in children and those with congenital heart disease, while also providing a lower-risk leadless pacemaker option for adults.
Mini organs are incomplete without blood vessels. To facilitate systematic studies and ensure meaningful comparisons with living organisms, a network of perfusable blood vessels and capillaries must be created — in a way that is precisely controllable and reproducible. A team has established a method using ultrashort laser pulses to create tiny blood vessels in a rapid and reproducible manner. Experiments show that these vessels behave just like those in living tissue. Liver lobules have been created on a chip with great success.
A research team has developed DeepNeo, an AI-powered algorithm that automates the process of analyzing coronary stents after implantation. The tool matches medical expert accuracy while significantly reducing assessment time. With strong validation in both human and animal models, Deep-Neo has the potential to standardize monitoring after stent implantation and thus improve cardiovascular treatment outcomes.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading — and growing — cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with the economic burden of care projected to skyrocket over the coming decades.
Boston Scientific entered 2025 with significant momentum. Fresh off a standout first quarter, the company’s leadership has outlined a compelling vision for sustainable long-term growth rooted in high-performing cardiology franchises, operational precision, and disruptive technologies in electrophysiology (EP). Leaders spoke at a recent Bank of America Healthcare Conference. The discussion marked outgoing CFO Dan Brennan’s final investor presentation and underscored Boston Scientific’s transformation into one of medtech’s most durable growth stories.
A pacemaker is a small device that helps control your heartbeat so you can return to your normal life. It has three main parts: a pulse generator that creates electrical signals, a controller-monitor that manages these signals, and leads that deliver the signals to the heart. One key benefit of the pacemaker is its strong titanium casing. Titanium is very strong and lightweight, and it is biocompatible, meaning it works well with the body without causing harmful reactions. This metal is highly resistant to corrosion, which helps keep the casing intact and protective even when exposed to bodily fluids.
An invention that uses microchip technology in implantable devices and other wearable products such as smart watches can be used to improve biomedical devices including those used to monitor people with glaucoma and heart disease.
A team of researchers has developed self-powered, wearable, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based contact layers for monitoring cardiovascular health. TENGs help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power.
Advancements in sensor technologies have led to increased interest in detecting and diagnosing “driver states”—collections of internal driver factors generally associated with negative driving performance, such as alcohol intoxication, cognitive load, stress, and fatigue. This is accomplished using imperfect behavioral and physiological indicators that are associated with those states. An example is the use of elevated heart rate variability, detected by a steering wheel sensor, as an indicator of frustration. Advances in sensor technologies, coupled with improvements in machine learning, have led to an increase in this research. However, a limitation is that it often excludes naturalistic driving environments, which may have conditions that affect detection. For example, reductions in visual scanning are often associated with cognitive load [1]; however, these reductions can also be related to novice driver inexperience [2] and alcohol intoxication [3]. Through our analysis of the research, we discover that the tendency to explore these singular driver states with only a comparison to “normal” driving is common. Additionally, research on interventions for these driver states is relatively scarce (fewer than 10% of cognitive load-related papers we examined assessed or discussed intervention solutions) and narrowly tailored to specific states [e.g., 4, vis-à-vis cognitive load]. States that share common behavioral and physiological markers tend to be explored independently when a more universal and integrated approach may be warranted. In this paper, we identify the need for a driver state and intervention framework that addresses these limitations by exploring state indicators and their overlap, interventions for one or multiple states, and major research gaps. Our framework offers practical approaches for handling one or many driver states, including interventions that may be deployed at different timings during a trip.
Every year, more than 5 million people in the United States are diagnosed with heart valve disease, but this condition has no effective long-term treatment. When a person’s heart valve is severely damaged by a birth defect, lifestyle, or aging, blood flow is disrupted. If left untreated, there can be fatal complications.
Recent successes in cultivating human heart tissue, knee cartilage, and pharmaceutical crystals in space have relied on technology that was initially developed decades ago with support from NASA.
With over 15,000 products, Boston Scientific is a market leader in pacemakers, defibrillators, monitoring equipment, spinal and brain stimulation, stents, catheters, and ablation devices. On one recent cardiac monitoring battery component, the company had an application running year-round on multiple mills, rectangular in shape, consisting of multiple milling operations per part, requiring an operator per mill at all times. Both Mill operations consist of multi-part fixtures as the process involved running Mill OP-1, light hand deburring and prepping the parts for Mill OP-2 fixture & process, following manual deburring step. The overall process was running around seven minutes per part.
A new device aims to detect acute exacerbations of chronic conditions. The wearable monitoring device contains multiple types of sensors, enabling faster and more accurate detection of exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic conditions like asthma, heart disease and other inflammatory disorders. Eventually, the technology may help everyday people monitor their overall health and attune to early warning signs of illness.
Biosensors are devices that can monitor physiological states, like heart rate or blood pressure, or detect biological parameters such as glucose levels or the presence of specific proteins in the blood. The information biosensors collect can be used to support a medical diagnosis (for instance, a specific infection) or to provide feedback to the user on parameters of interest (for instance, the number of calories burned in a workout).
Researchers at University of Galway have developed a way of bioprinting tissues that change shape as a result of cell-generated forces, in the same way that it happens in biological tissues during organ development.
A study at Mayo Clinic suggests that an hourglass-shaped stent could improve blood flow and ease severe and reoccurring chest pain in people with microvascular disease. Of 30 participants in a phase 2 clinical trial, 76 percent saw improvement in their day-to-day life. For example, some participants who reported not being able to walk around the block or up a flight of stairs without chest pain were able to do these ordinary physical activities at the end of a 120-day period.
Interventional cardiologists have long used the traditional angiogram technique to diagnose and plan interventional procedures. An estimated 80–85 percent still lean on the process, which includes injecting contrasting material and utilizing x-ray images to guide the next steps for patient care. The other 15–20 percent supplement angiography with catheter-driven intravascular imaging devices to view arteries internally. Intravascular imaging is rapidly growing, with technological advancements, increased physician utilization, and a growing body of evidence showing positive patient outcomes when imaging is used to guide procedures.
Wearable devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers interact with parts of our bodies to measure and learn from internal processes, such as our heart rate or sleep stages. Now, MIT researchers have developed wearable devices that may be able to perform similar functions for individual cells inside the body.
Komatsu introduced its first battery-electric load-haul-dump (LHD) machine, the WX04B, at the MINExpo tradeshow in September. The WX04B is designed specifically for narrow vein mines in underground hard rock mining operations. Komatsu is pairing the electric LHD with its new OEM-agnostic 150-kW battery charger that was also revealed in Las Vegas. The 4-tonne WX04B LHD features what Komatsu claims is best-in-class energy density, offering up to four hours of runtime on a single charge. The Li-ion NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) battery from Proterra has a capacity of 165 kWh and nominal voltage of 660 V. Fewer charge cycles are needed compared to competitors, the company claims, which helps to maximize operational efficiency and minimize downtime. Proterra and Komatsu began their collaboration on the LHD's H Series battery system in 2021, long before Komatsu's acquisition of American Battery Solutions (ABS) in December 2023.
The Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada
In the quest to develop lifelike materials to replace and repair human body parts, scientists face a formidable challenge: Real tissues are often both strong and stretchable and vary in shape and size.
University of Waterloo Chemical Engineering Researcher Dr. Elisabeth Prince teamed up with researchers from the University of Toronto and Duke University to design the synthetic material made using cellulose nanocrystals, which are derived from wood pulp. The material is engineered to replicate the fibrous nanostructures and properties of human tissues, thereby recreating its unique biomechanical properties.
A wearable health monitor can reliably measure levels of important biochemicals in sweat during physical exercise. The 3D-printed monitor could someday provide a simple and non-invasive way to track health conditions and diagnose common diseases, such as diabetes, gout, kidney disease or heart disease.
For many patients waiting for a donor heart, the only way to live a decent life is with the help of a pump attached directly to their heart. This pump requires about as much power as a TV, which it draws from an external battery via a seven-millimeter-thick cable. The system is handy and reliable, but it has one big flaw: despite medical treatment, the point at which the cable exits the abdomen can be breached by bacteria.
Understanding heart function and disease, as well as testing new drugs for heart conditions, has long been a complex and time-consuming task. A promising way to study disease and test new drugs is to use cellular and engineered tissue models in a dish, but existing methods to study heart cell contraction and calcium handling require a good deal of manual work, are prone to errors, and need expensive specialized equipment.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed an exosome-coated stent with a “smart-release” trigger that could both prevent reopened blood vessels from narrowing and deliver regenerative stem cell-derived therapy to blood-starved, or ischemic, tissue.
iMotions employs neuroscience and AI-powered analysis tools to enhance the tracking, assessment and design of human-machine interfaces inside vehicles. The advancement of vehicles with enhanced safety and infotainment features has made evaluating human-machine interfaces (HMI) in modern commercial and industrial vehicles crucial. Drivers face a steep learning curve due to the complexities of these new technologies. Additionally, the interaction with advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) increases concerns about cognitive impact and driver distraction in both passenger and commercial vehicles. As vehicles incorporate more automation, many clients are turning to biosensor technology to monitor drivers' attention and the effects of various systems and interfaces. Utilizing neuroscientific principles and AI, data from eye-tracking, facial expressions and heart rate are informing more effective system and interface design strategies. This approach ensures that automation advancements improve rather than hinder the driving experience.
As medical devices in today’s modern medicine continue to advance, they require power supplies that allow them to perform an ever-widening roles. These lightweight, wearable — and even implantable — medical devices comprise everything from activity/exercise watches, hearing aids, and medical call buttons to pacemakers, insulin pump monitors, and neuro- or gastric stimulators, as well as implantable cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators (ICDs). The rechargeable batteries used in these devices must provide for such vital functions as monitoring, signal processing, collecting and transmitting data, and providing specialized electronic pulses when needed to stimulate cardiac output and other physiological activity.
The global medical device market offers opportunities for innovation-driven growth. Demand for smart, new lifesaving and life-enhancing technologies is perhaps stronger than ever. Manufacturers around the world looking to capitalize on this eager global market face a long list of challenges — some big, some small. Supply-chain disruptions, labor shortages, rising materials costs, and other headwinds are leading to delays in both engineering and manufacturing processes. Despite these challenges, the world demands medical device manufacturers’ best. A surging geriatric population, implications of a global pandemic, and the mortality rates for heart disease, cancer, obesity, and other conditions are all contributing to strong and sustained market demand. One study predicts a compound annual growth (CAGR) of 5.4 percent will push global sales of medical devices to nearly $658 billion (USD) by 2028. Of course, the road to success will be littered with familiar roadblocks — and some that are entirely new.
Monitoring the success of surgery on blood vessels is challenging, as the first sign of trouble often comes too late. By that time, the patient often needs additional surgery that carries risks similar to the original procedure. A new device could make it easier for doctors to monitor the success of blood vessel surgery.
ECGs help manage cardiovascular disease — which affects around 4 million Australians and kills more than 100 people every day — by alerting users to seek medical care.
Items per page:
50
1 – 50 of 559