heartbeat tagged posts

Skin patch health monitor.

A new type of acoustic sensor that resembles a small Band-Aid on the skin can monitor your heartbeat and other health measures. The sensor may one day offer a way to painlessly and wirelessly track an individual’s health. The patch, which weighs <1/100 of an ounce, can help doctors monitor heart health, stomach condition, vocal cord activity, lung performance and potentially many other bodily functions. “We’ve developed a soft, skin-like device that can listen to internal sounds created by function of internal organs,” explained John Rogers.

“Think of the device as a wearable, skin-mounted stethoscope. But with capabilities for continuous listening and recording of not only sounds, but also low-frequency vibrations,” Rogers said.
The research team behind this lat...

Microtubules in a cardiomyocyte at rest (top) and when compressed. Credit: The lab of Ben Prosser, Ph.D., Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

Using new high-resolution microscopy, a team from the Perelman School of Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania found microtubules (MT) interact with the heart’s contractile machinery to provide mechanical resistance for the beating of the heart. Their findings could have implications for better understanding how microtubules affect the mechanics of the beating heart, and what happens when this goes awry.

Alterations in this microtubule network have been suggested to contribute to heart disease, but just how microtubules behave in the beating heart is poorly understood...