Coronavirus sensor you stick at the top of your chest can track symptoms

It looks like a Band-Aid, but it's a flexible wireless sensor that sits where your throat and chest meet, picking up coughing and breathing problems associated with COVID-19. The device, announced Monday, can monitor early signs of coronavirus infection and the progression of the illness.

Developed in hard-hit Chicago by Northwestern University and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, the device adheres to the skin below your suprasternal notch -- the little well at the base of your throat where airflow is closest to the skin and where tracheostomies are performed. This patch, however, is noninvasive and is related to a sensor for monitoring speech and swallowing in recovering stroke patients. That design was tuned to track coughing and breathing problems that are central to COVID-19.

"We don't use a microphone," says Professor John Rogers, director of Northwestern University's Center on Bio-Integrated Electronics. "There are problems with microphones with ambient noise and tremendous invasions of privacy. We use a high-bandwidth, tri-axis accelerometer to measure movement of the surface of the skin" to capture details of breathing and coughing, not unlike a digital stethoscope.

The patch also detects heart rate and temperature.

Once a day you peel it off and place it on a wireless charger, which triggers the patch to sync its stored data with a nearby iPad. From there the data is uploaded to a HIPAA-compliant cloud where a proprietary AI algorithm examines it for anomalies related to COVID-19. The device has no external ports for power or connectivity, making it easier to disinfect.

AI has taken something of beating lately for promising more than it could deliver in health diagnosis.

"We like AI, but we're not wedded to it. We're wedded to things that work," says Rogers. "We use digital filtering algorithms that look for particular signatures in the data. We're looking for trends, not an absolute gold standard measurement. And we have a good understanding of the underlying physics."

At this early stage, the data is double-checked by a trained human before any indications are forwarded to medical providers. Twenty-five test subjects have been wearing the device for two weeks so far, generating about 1,500 hours of history and one terabyte of data.
Arun Jayaraman, research scientist at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab

Missing from the sensor patch is a blood oxygen perfusion sensor, but Rogers suggests that is coming in the near future. Fingertip pulse oximeters, which measure oxygen perfusion, are the latest personal health product to be snapped up after some reports indicated that low blood oxygen was a hallmark of onset of COVID-19.

A lab at Northwestern's Chicago campus is currently producing dozens of new patches a week. It has the ability to scale to hundreds of devices a week before making the patch available for volume manufacturing via license.

Beyond this pandemic, the Northwestern COVID-19 sensor joins an array of activity trackers, glucose monitors and blood-pressure sensors that suggest we'll soon wear a clinic's worth of medical sensors to get in front of health issues before they turn serious.

"I think that demands a hardware platform that is virtually imperceptible," says Rogers. "Health care in general will be improved when you move from episodic monitoring of status to continuous. I've always thought that makes sense."

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.

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A Guide to Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is caused by Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacterium that’s transmitted to humans when they are bitten by an infected black-legged or deer tick. Once infected, symptoms can occur anywhere from 3-30 days after the bite, and they can be wide-ranging, depending on the stage of infection. The chances of contracting Lyme disease from a tick bite depends on the kind of tick, where you were bitten, when the bite occurred, and how long the tick was attached to you. According to the CDC, black-legged ticks must be attached for at least 24 hours to transmit Lyme disease.

What Are the Symptoms of Lyme Disease?

Early signs and symptoms of this disease include chills, fever, fatigue, headaches, muscle and joint pain, and swollen lymph nodes. In about 70-80% of infections a rash is seen. This rash will gradually expand over a period of days and can grow to around 12 inches wide. It may feel warm to the touch, but it shouldn’t be itchy or painful, and it can appear anywhere on the body.

As the infection progresses, symptoms can include:
• Severe headaches or neck stiffness
• Heart palpitation or an irregular heartbeat
• Inflammation of the spinal cord and brain
• Loss of muscle tone or drooping on one or both sides of the face
• Additional rashes on other parts of the body
• Arthritis with severe joint pain and swelling, particularly in the knees
• Shooting pains, numbness, and tingling in the hands or feet

How is Lyme Disease Diagnosed?
Lyme disease is diagnosed based on symptoms and history of tick exposure. A two-step blood test may also be taken, but the accuracy of this test depends on the stage the disease is in. For example, in the first few weeks of infection, the test may be negative, as antibodies take a few weeks to develop. These tests aren’t recommended for patients who don’t have any of the common symptoms of Lyme disease.

How is Lyme Disease Treated?
The antibiotics amoxicillin and tetra cycline are used, usually for 10-21 days. Other antibiotics that might be used are cefuroxime and doxycycline. If you get treatment for Lyme disease when the infection is at an early stage, it is likely that you will make a full recovery.

How Prevalent is Lyme Disease?

About 30,00 cases are reported each year, but the CDC estimates that you can add another 300,000 infections to this figure. Infection is more common in males up to age 15 and between the ages of 40 and 60. The reason for this is these are people who are more likely to play outside, and go hiking, camping, and hunting.

What Areas Are More Likely to Have Lyme Disease?
Mainly the Mid-Atlantic states, New England, and parts of the upper Midwest. According to the CDC, 95% of confirmed cases in 2015 were in the following 14 states: Delaware, Maine, Connecticut, Minnesota, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Black-legged ticks can be found in 43 states, but they behave differently according to the climate. For example, in the South, which is more prone to hot weather, ticks tend to stay under leaf litter and don’t come out to feed as they’ll dry out. This means that Southern ticks don’t transmit Lyme disease frequently as they don’t tend to feed on humans.

What’s Driving up Lyme Disease Numbers?
While increasing temperatures worldwide has made more Northern areas such as Maine, Canada, and Minnesota hospitable to ticks, the population of deer carrying the ticks probably plays a much bigger role.

Development led to record low numbers of deer early in the last century, but the deer population has increased as a result of reforestation over the past several decades, 
meaning the tick population has increased as well. Furthermore, white-footed mice, which also transmit Lyme disease to ticks that bite them, are moving closer to humans as their habitat disappears.

Another reason is that warm weather and mild winters may bring more people outside, increasing their chances of being bitten, especially in Lyme-prone areas.

How Do You Know If You’ve Been Bitten?

Since ticks are the size of a poppy seed, you’ve got to have pretty good eyesight to spot them. The CDC recommends that if you’ve been walking in the woods, tall grass, or working in your garden, that you check your skin afterwards, ideally in the bath or shower.

What Do You Do If There’s a Tick Under Your Skin
Remove it with a pair of tweezers as soon as possible, pulling upward with steady pressure. If parts of the tick remain in your skin, try to remove them with the tweezers. After everything is out, clean the area with rubbing alcohol or soap and water. Put the tick in a piece of tissue, and close it in a zip bag.

When should You See Your Doctor?
A rash is a pretty good indication that you might have Lyme disease. Therefore, if a rash starts to develop in the area you were bitten, you should visit your doctor immediately. At this stage of the illness, treatment with some antibiotics will likely see you make a full recovery.

What’s the Best Way to Prevent a Tick Bite?
Ticks cannot fly or jump, but instead live in shrubs and bushes, and grab onto someone when they walk by. To avoid getting bitten, wear pants and socks in woods, areas with a lot of trees, and while handling fallen leaves. Wear some tick repellents and clothing that has DEET, lemon oil, or eucalyptus.

Shower as soon as you get home. This lets you look at your skin and wash any ticks out of your hair. Furthermore, put the clothes you were wearing into a hot wash to kill whatever ticks might remain.

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This Neural Jelly-Like Implant is the Future

While brain-analyzing technologies such as MRI scans are ever-improving, sometimes researchers need to get inside their subjects’ brain in a more literal sense. For example, in order to get readings from specific brain cells, as well as to integrate brains with prosthetic or medical devices, a physical electrode must be inserted into the brain itself.

 

As one can imagine, this isn’t fun at all. In fact, recently, scientists have called for improved safety guidelines and better research into how these electrodes destroy brain cells, as well as how they trigger the brains’ inflammatory immune system response.

 

Now, researchers  may have found a way around this. They’ve developed a flexible, squishy-silicon-based hydrogel that sticks to neural tissue, bringing non-invasive electrodes to the brain’s surface.

This hydrogel, which was tested on a cat’s dorsal root ganglion – a cluster of spinal nerve cells – can conform and adhere to cells. This lets the enclosed electrodes record brain activity without actually exposing the brain to the electrodes.

The researchers are hoping that their work will lead to a new era of safer neural implants, while also giving rise to better, more accurate neural readings that could help us better understand diseases and other brain conditions.

In a press release, an engineer who worked on the hydrogel said: “Imagine you have a bowl of Jell-O, and you insert a rigid plastic fork into the bowl and move it around.” This is what it’s like when a conventional electrode is inserted into the brain. 

While this is an over exaggeration, electrodes do cause a tiny amount of structural damage on their way down through the cortex. While scientists are still split on whether or not the adult human brain can grow new cells, it’s probably best to minimize the number of holes that you drill into it.

Furthermore, the brain knows that electrodes don’t belong there, so it calls on the immune system to fight them off. This leads to the eventual degradation of electrodes, meaning they give off inaccurate cell recordings and hamper neuroscientific research. Since the hydrogel can pass as brain-like, the body is much less likely to try to fight it off.

It’s far too early to say exactly how this new neural implant hydrogel will affect the realm of medical neuroscience, but if human trials work as well as the experiments on cats, then the brain-computer interfaces of the future could become much more seamless and a lot less harmful.

THIS IS ONLY FOR INFORMATION, ALWAYS CONSULT YOU PHYSICIAN BEFORE HAVING ANY PARTICULAR FOOD/ MEDICATION/EXERCISE/OTHER REMEDIES.                                                                                                                                                                                                        PS- THOSE INTERESTED IN RECIPES ARE FREE TO  VIEW MY BLOG-                                                                                           https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com/  

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