Detecting Undiagnosed Silent Killers
This week I am talking to Prof. Arik Eisenkraft, MD, MHA, the Chief Medical Officer for BioBeats – a new step in continuous monitoring for blood pressure with a wearable device (watch or patch) that does not use an inflatable cuff for measuring your blood pressure.
The journey to this point was driven by a clear patient need with the frustration in mass casualty events the clinical team was frustrated with the lack of readily available up to date clinical information on critical patients. Combine this with a founder who had deep experience in the pulse oximetry and the technology behind measuring the pulse and oxygen saturation using Plethysmographic trace. THere’s a simmer description of this here and a great deep dive here: The How What and Why of EMS Pulse Oximetry.
The range of variables they are reporting able to measure is impressive and while the FDA clearance is limited it does include continuous blood pressure monitoring (without a cuff).
We discuss the resistance to the concept that some have expressed believing this to be impossible with the tools they propose but as Arik explains they have managed to capture a cleaner signal, changing the signal to noise ratio that has been part of the innovation alongside their unique algorithm. They are working on publishing multiple studies to demonstrate the science.
Listen in to hear what persuaded Arik, who arrived at this company with much of the same resistance to the concept that this was real (hint it was based on data and compared against a gold standard of arterial lines and Swan-Ganz catheters)
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