The world’s smallest wearable cardiac monitor, a toffee-sized silicon locket, is almost ready at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).
While the tiny computer that can store a week’s electrocardiogram (ECG) data awaits a manufacturer, it is already in demand. IIT engineers borrow it, rig some adjustments and the locket meant to monitor a heart without hospital visits measures tremors in buildings instead.
“I would be the first to buy one for my mother. The basic device is like plug-and-play,’’ said IIT’s professor Rakesh Lal, of the School of Bioscience and Bioengineering, who conceptualised the project with professor S. Mukherji. “There isn’t another product like the silicon locket,’’ Lal told HT from the University of California where he is a visiting fellow. Similar ECG monitors in the market are walkman-sized or bigger.
The demand for a user-friendly cardiac monitor is urgent in India, where, as top cardiologist Devi Shetty puts it, ‘heart disease is like an epidemic.’ “Indians are genetically three times more vulnerable to heart attacks than Europeans,’’ Dr Shetty, chairman, Narayana Hrudayalaya, told HT from Bangalore. “The average age of my patients in India is 45 years. Fathers bring their young sons for bypass grafting.”
Indians and South Asians are prone to a first heart attack at age 53, and the World Health Organisation estimates that 60 per cent of the world’s cardiac patients could be Indians by 2010.
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The world’s smallest wearable cardiac monitor, a toffee-sized silicon locket, is almost ready at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B).
While the tiny computer that can store a week’s electrocardiogram (ECG) data awaits a manufacturer, it is already in demand. IIT engineers borrow it, rig some adjustments and the locket meant to monitor a heart without hospital visits measures tremors in buildings instead.
“I would be the first to buy one for my mother. The basic device is like plug-and-play,’’ said IIT’s professor Rakesh Lal, of the School of Bioscience and Bioengineering, who conceptualised the project with professor S. Mukherji. “There isn’t another product like the silicon locket,’’ Lal told HT from the University of California where he is a visiting fellow. Similar ECG monitors in the market are walkman-sized or bigger.
The demand for a user-friendly cardiac monitor is urgent in India, where, as top cardiologist Devi Shetty puts it, ‘heart disease is like an epidemic.’ “Indians are genetically three times more vulnerable to heart attacks than Europeans,’’ Dr Shetty, chairman, Narayana Hrudayalaya, told HT from Bangalore. “The average age of my patients in India is 45 years. Fathers bring their young sons for bypass grafting.”
Indians and South Asians are prone to a first heart attack at age 53, and the World Health Organisation estimates that 60 per cent of the world’s cardiac patients could be Indians by 2010.
Discuss
Tell a friend
Bury
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