As Jim and Mass Device report, this is the first public look at Canary’s cardiac monitor recently tested in patients in South America. The commercial version will have a customized battery and specialized componentry that will reduce its size to less than half of that shown. It can be placed under the skin in the precordium (over the heart) using minimally invasive techniques that can be performed in office in a few minutes. Taking advantage of the principle of auscultation (“listening” to the heart sounds - a clinical skill all physicians learned in medical school), this digital auditory device can “hear” and quantify the amount of stenosis or regurgitation present in the 4 heart valves. An ECG assists with accurately timing the heart sounds as well as providing rhythm assessment. By identifying“crackles” in the lungs, fluid balance and heart failure status can be assessed. Narrowings or “bruits” in the carotid and coronary arteries can be detected and quantified. The body is a very noisy place; the key is filtering out all the unwanted sounds to identify those that are relevent to cardiac assessment. In future iterations, sensors will be added to assess pressure and flow. The stethoscope has been an essential medical tool for over a century because it can identify so many different cardiac pathologies. It hangs around the neck of every clinician precisely for that reason. Placing it subcutaneously makes sound collection and identification ten times more accurate. Digitalizing the sound signal makes it possible to isolate, amplify, and quantify the auditory information. This device aims to be a tool that augments what physicians have already known for a hundred years - except it will be on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and report back automatically for years.
Here's a first look at the latest medical device from smart implant developer Canary Medical Inc. The device's first-in-human trial was also the first first human implantation of a cardiac auscultation sensor device. (Read more from Sean Whooley at MassDevice: https://lnkd.in/eUri7QCi) I'm told CARE is just an internal project name for the device, not a final product name like the CHIRP (Canary Health Implanted Reporting Processor) implant used in Zimmer Biomet Persona knee implants.
Medical Director, retired.
6moSeem to be a very useful application! Could the device also assess blood flow? Or change in blood flow?