By Eliza Strickland
Today, when doctors suspect that a patient has a cardiac arrhythmia that could lead to a heart attack, they can implant a tiny cardiac monitor smaller than a AAA battery in the patient’s chest, directly over the heart. The company that makes that monitor, Medtronic, thinks the day will come when perfectly healthy people will be clamoring to have that gear inside them as well.
At a Medical Design & Manufacturing conference today, Medtronic program director Mark Phelps described his company’s successful efforts to miniaturize its cardiac technologies. In February, the company began a clinical trial of itspill-sized pacemaker, which is implanted inside the heart. While Phelps presented that tiny pacemaker as a remarkable feat of engineering, he saved his real excitement for the tiny Linq cardiac monitor, which went on sale this year. Phelps declared that the device heralded “the beginning of a new industry” in diagnostic and monitoring implants.
Phelps argued that such an implant could be enhanced with more sensors to give people reams of biometric information, which would improve their healthcare throughout their lives. Young healthy people could use the sensors to track heart rate and calories burned, the kind of information that quantified selfers get today from wearable gadgets like the Fitbit. Later, the sensors would help with disease management, as they could be programmed to monitor particular organs or systems. Finally, they could enable independent living for the elderly by allowing doctors to keep watch over their patients remotely. “I would argue that it will eventually be seen as negligent not to have these sensors,” Phelps said. “It’s like driving without any gauges of your feedback systems.”
The data generated by these implants would be provided to both the patient and the physician, Phelps said, and would allow both to see how lifestyle changes affect the patient’s health over time, or how his or her body reacts to certain pharmaceuticals. This Big Data approach could enable a shift from reactive, symptom-based medicine to a preventative care model.
Such a medical system would be intrusive in two senses, Phelps admitted: Not only would doctors be physically cutting into a patient’s body, they would also be exposing a great deal of the patient’s biometric data. Yet Phelps believes that people will embrace the sensor-enabled lifestyle. “You’ll get so used to having that feedback and information, you won’t be able to imagine life without it,” he said.
