Telemedicine is seen as a discipline with greater implementation in the near future due to the new forms of patient care promoted after the pandemic and the constant technological advances applied to the health sector. The academic and business worlds are showing increasing interest in the collection, control and use of data for the development of technologies such as the Internet of Things or artificial intelligence. This is confirmed by the appearance of prototypes of the first technological devices intended for an accurate and autonomous measurement of the different health indicators.
Currently, smartwatches and sports bracelets have become accessible gadgets for the general population, whose functions include the possibility of downloading applications to measure heart rate. But what if in the short term we were all able to know our blood pressure just by placing a finger on a touchpad attached to the mobile? And best of all, for a really low cost. In this process are some engineers from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), who have devised a practical and economical prototype that they plan to market as an alternative to conventional sphygmomanometers.
Researchers at the American university have developed a 3D-printed clip that fits over the camera and flash of smartphones to monitor blood pressure using the user’s finger. According to the portal specialized in technology SciTech Daily, each unit of this prototype costs less than a dollar, and could be reduced to 10 cents if manufactured on a large scale. This characteristic multiplies, in the words of its promoters, the possibilities of knowing and monitoring this health indicator and can be very useful for those patients who cannot often travel to a doctor’s office.
So far, this device has shown results comparable to those reported by blood pressure cuffs. One of the advantages of this clip is that, unlike traditional instruments, it is not necessary to calibrate it beforehand to adapt it to each user. That is why one of the project engineers, Yinan Xuan, warns of the not remote possibility that, in the near future, patients will receive these devices in consultation with their GPs, as is the case with toothbrushes offered by dentists.
The operation of this auxiliary device is really simple. The patient will have to place the pad of his finger on the tactile part of the clip. Next, pressure must be exerted on the clip to activate the phone’s flash to illuminate the fingertip. That light travels to the camera as an image of a red circle through a pin-sized duct.
Then the mobile app extracts the information from the red circle. By size, the amount of pressure applied by the user’s finger can be measured, and by brightness, the app measures the volume of blood flowing in and out of the fingertip. Finally, an algorithm converts this information into graphs of systolic and diastolic blood pressure.