Bringing medical ultrasound
to the home

Holst Centre has taken solid first steps in wearable ultrasound devices, enabling comfortable continuous and safe at-home monitoring.

Ultrasound offers safe, radiation-free medical imaging. However, current ultrasound systems require manual manipulation by a highly skilled operator and offer a small field of view. At Holst Centre, we develop ultrasound patches that can be worn on the neck or on the chest. These patches can sense and measure blood flow inside the carotid artery or the heart, giving relevant clinical information on, for instance, blood pressure, arterial plaque build-up and cardiac output. Lab tests performed with this hands-free ultrasound patch created the first high-quality images proving that this technology is very promising indeed.

Comfortable at-home monitoring

Instead of going to the hospital for a snapshot impression with the current ultrasound equipment, this hands-free patch solution enables comfortable continuous and safe at-home monitoring. The patches can also be used, for example, for at home monitoring of high-risk pregnancies. By producing these patches in large volumes and at low costs, ultrasound monitoring becomes available for developing countries, especially because this technology does not require trained medical staff, which adds to the democratisation of healthcare.