One evening suddenly started to realize I was having trouble breathing, but it got worse
and worse to where I couldn't even go from the chair I was sitting in to the bathroom
without – I mean, I had to go so slow, and then I would just collapse and I could hardly
get back up.
There are almost 6 million Americans living with heart failure today, and heart failure
is the condition in which the heart isn't really failing, it's just not pumping blood
as efficiently as it should, and sometimes that means it's not meeting the demands of
the body.
So, on of the main functions of the heart is to propel blood forward, taking blood from
the lungs, sending it on towards the body.
So, if it's not doing that well enough you start to have fluid back up into the lungs
and that fluid gives people symptoms.
They get really short of breath, especially when they lie down.
And if the fluid is backing up into the rest of the body it can cause swelling in the legs
and weight gain.
The goal for patients who have heart failure is to keep them feeling well, keep their heart
functioning well, and keep them at home and out of the hospital.
So, primary care doctors and cardiologists who manage patients with heart failure use
an array of medications to make this possible.
Unfortunately, the only tools that we have right now to see how well the medications
are working and how well the patient's heart is doing, or asking the patients about their
symptoms and asking them to weigh themselves everyday so they can see if they start to
put on fluid weight.
I weigh myself daily, I take my blood pressure daily, and those things are just so if there
are big changes, big increases, for example, in my weight that's a very likely indication
that I'm retaining water and fluid, and that's an indication that my heart isn't functioning
the way it should be.
Unfortunately, sometimes these signs come too late and by the time a patient notices
symptoms or has started to put on weight they are already past the point where an additional
dose of medication is gonna help and they end up coming into the hospital.
But there has to be a better way, because if you think about it physiologically, the
heart function has already started to decline well in advance of these symptoms developing.
So, there's this pre-symptomatic window when the heart function has decreased but fluid
hasn't backed up enough to the point where the patient's feeling any symptoms.
We wanted to create a device that could monitor patients during this pre-symptomatic window,
hopefully detecting a decline in heart function before the patients feel any symptoms.
It turns out that every time your heart beats, your weight actually changes just a little
bit.
This weight change can be detected by modifying an ordinary bathroom scale.
Over the last few years at Stanford we've recorded data from this modified bathroom
scale on many subjects, mainly athletes and healthy volunteers, and have shown that this
slight weight change that occurs with every heartbeat is actually proportional to cardiac
output, or the amount of blood that your heart is pumping with every beat.
To use the device, you simply stand on a bathroom scale like you normally would.
Some bathroom scales have handlebars for measuring body fat.
We've repurposed these to measure the electrocardiogram, but this is an optional measurement.
After standing on the scale, the scale collects the data and sends it over Bluetooth to a
Cloud server where it can be viewed simply by opening a web browser.
: If I had some way to know on a regular basis, I mean, daily would be wonderful, wonderful,
but on a regular basis how my heart was doing would be a tremendous relief.
So, based on the success of the preliminary data collected with this device, we're now
designing a clinical trial using heart failure patients.
We'll be enrolling them as they come into the hospital with a heart failure exacerbation
and tracking as their heart function improves over the course of their stay, and then sending
the device home with them to continue monitoring their heart function remotely once they're
back in their home.
After this Phase 1 trial, we'll then have enough data to justify a large clinical trial
to see if our device can actually make an improvement in heart failure care.
I'm Mozziyar Etemadi.
I'm a fourth year M.B.P.C.
student here at U.C.S.F.
I've always been an engineer at heart.
I've been working on this project as an electrical engineering student for the past five years
and I'm just so excited now, as a medical student, to see this technology finally make
it to the clinic.
This is, in fact, what I really hope to do with the rest of my career is create innovations
at the interface between medicine and engineering and see them through to clinical practice.