A wearable system to monitor the stomach’s activity throughout the day

San Diego, Calif., March 22, 2018 — A team of researchers has developed a wearable, non-invasive system to monitor electrical activity in the stomach over 24 hours—essentially an electrocardiogram but for the gastro-intestinal (GI) tract.

Applications include monitoring GI activity for patients outside of a clinical setting, which cuts down costs. Monitoring for longer periods of time also increases the likelihood of capturing abnormal events.

Researchers detail their findings in the March 22 issue of Nature’s open access journalScientific Reports.

The team tested the device, a 3D printed portable box connected to 10 small wearable electrodes, on 11 children and one adult volunteer. They found that data collected with the wearable system were comparable to data collected in the clinic with state-of-the-art methods, which are invasive–including a catheter inserted through the patient’s nose. They also found that the stomach’s electrical activity changes not only around meals, but also during sleep, following its own circadian rhythm.

“We think our system will spark a new kind of medicine, where a gastroenterologist can quickly see where and when a part of the GI tract is showing abnormal rhythms and as a result make more accurate, faster and personalized diagnoses,” said Armen Gharibans (UCSD BioE ’17), the paper’s first author and a bioengineering postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego.

Todd Coleman, the paper’s corresponding author and a UC San Diego professor of bioengineering, agrees.

“This work opens the door accurately monitoring the dynamic activity of the GI system,” he said. “Until now, it was quite challenging to accurately measure the electrical patterns of stomach activity in a continuous manner, outside of a clinical setting. From now on, we will be able to observe patterns and analyze them in both healthy and unwell people as they go about their daily lives.”

Physicians involved with the study say the device meets an unmet clinical need.

“This will help us determine if the stomach is functioning properly during meals and – most importantly – when patients are experiencing symptoms such as nausea and belly pain,” said Dr. David Kunkel, one of the paper’s co-authors and a gastroenterologist at UC San Diego Health.

The breakthrough was made possible because engineers and physicians came together to work on the problem, said Benjamin Smarr, one of the paper’s co-authors and a chronobiologist at UC Berkeley.

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