A new wrist health sensor has been developed that could help tackle a ‘silent killer’ responsible for millions of deaths worldwide – high blood pressure.
Glaswegian company Novosound has shown off a working prototype of an ultrasound blood pressure monitor at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
The tiny ultrasound sensor can be built into existing smart watches and health wristbands, and could potentially be on the market within as little as 18 months to two years, the company has told Yahoo News.
In the past, measuring blood pressure required bulky inflatable cuffs, and was usually administered by health professionals, meaning high blood pressure often went undiagnosed.
Why is this important?
High blood pressure is a major cause of premature death worldwide, largely through heart attacks and strokes.
However, one in two of the billion people worldwide with high blood pressure are unaware they have the condition, according to the World Health Organization.
The smart watch market already has devices that can measure blood pressure, to varying degrees of accuracy with some requiring an inflatable cuff to work. However, Novosound says that the ultrasound element of its breakthrough tech has the potential to make it truly revolutionary, brining medical-grade accuracy to people’s wrists – if it can be produced at scale.
Making a blood pressure monitor small enough to fit into devices such as smart watches had previously been a ‘Holy Grail’ of technology, Dr Dave Hughes, founder of Novosound, told Yahoo News.
“Typical ultrasound systems are used for imaging babies inside hospitals, and are quite big objects,” he said. “But if you want to look inside the wrist, you need very fine imaging resolution. But in the ultrasound world, that becomes very expensive, very fast.”
Dr Hughes began researching low power, high-resolution ultrasound imaging as an academic 10 years ago.
“By overcoming that resolution challenge at a low cost we were able to solve the problem, to move it towards smart watches and then keep it low power enough that a smart watch or even a smart ring could power this ultrasound system on your wrist,” he said.
The blood pressure monitor works using ultrasound (Novosound)
Most smart watches have sensors such as heart rate monitors, but these don’t look inside the body, meaning problems such as high blood pressure can’t be detected.
“They only ever look just skin deep,” Dr Hughes explained. “They sit on the surface, and they don’t actually look inside the body. And that means catastrophic health events can happen, such as stroke, pre-indicator strokes and obviously blood pressure, but current smart watches just can’t measure it accurately.”
The Novosound sensor “watches” arteries move as the heart beats, and can calculate blood pressure from the movement.
Dr Hughes said: “That really opens up the ability for smart watches to address the Holy Grail of digital health, which is accurate blood pressure measurement from the wrist in a completely non-invasive way.”
The Glasgow-based start-up was established in 2018 as a spin-out from the University of the West of Scotland. It has since secured a £1m grant from Scottish Enterprise and raised £2 million in a recent funding round led by Par Equity. It is now seeking partners to commercialise its technology at CES to license the technology for use in smart rings and smart watches.
Dr Hughes added: “What we can see is, within 18 to 24 months, the sensor rolling out into existing smart watches or fitness bands, and then people can buy it.”
Health wearables a big business
Wearable devices armed with health sensors such as heart rate monitors have become big business worldwide.
Analysts have placed the current size of the market as anything between $40bn and $90bn, with one projection stating it could grow to $325bn by 2032.
Research shows that 30% of US adults now wear a medical sensor, with 47% of those users wearing them daily.
The sensors in Apple Watch have been credited with saving multiple lives including a Georgia man, Keith Simpson, who was alerted to the presence of seven potentially deadly blood clots due to his low heart rate.
Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor has been credited with saving lives (Alamy)
But measuring blood pressure without bulky hospital monitors has proved elusive.
Novosound’s ultrasound-based approach enabled the company to take a huge leap in miniaturising blood pressure sensors.
Dr Hughes told Yahoo News, “That was really the step forward, and the miniaturisation enabling ultrasound to leave hospitals and get into consumer devices.
The Novosound device has other advantages over the sensors typically used in hospitals.
Dr Hughes said, “Most conventional ultrasound systems require wet gels for signal conduction, complicating wearable use. Novosound’s proprietary thin-film ultrasound sensors overcome these limitations by providing a dry solution that delivers flexibility, high resolution, and scalable manufacturability.”
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