Monday, August 29, 2022

It's Time for "No"

We all – well, most of us – try to be agreeable.  It’s usually a better social lubricant to say “yes” than “no.”  It’s widely considered to be better for your career to be the one who always says “yes” instead of being the troublesome worker who often says “no.”  “Yes, dear” is a safer marital strategy than “no” or “not again.”  But, like most conventional wisdoms, these deserve to be challenged.

I’ve read several articles recently where “no” is the suggested strategy, and I think there’s something there.  Especially for healthcare. 

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The first is a fun, fascinating, possibly far-reaching article in Nature,Why four scientists spent a year saying no. The authors are “a group of mid-career environmental social scientists” who felt they were saying “yes” to too many commitments.  As a result, they decided to not only be more deliberate about saying no but also to track it.  Their goal was to collectively decline 100 work-related requests, which they hit in March 2022.

It's harder than you might think; as the authors warn: “It involves rethinking priorities and empowering ourselves and our colleagues to set boundaries.”  They had to forget FOMO (fear of missing out) and embrace JOMO (joy of missing out), in order to create more room for intentional “yes.”

They offer four insights about the learned skill of saying “no”:

·       Tracking helped make “no” an option;

·       Say no more often ad to larger asks;

·       Saying no is emotional work;

·       Practice makes “no” easier.

It’s often so tempting to just say “yes,” but we’ve all only got so much time and energy.  Sometimes “no” is the best answer. 

"No."

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Sometimes, though, the saying “no” is not out loud; sometimes we say no by our actions.  Which leads me to a new trend: “quiet quitting.” 

This is another TikTok trend, started by one user (@zkchillin) in July and quickly going viral.  The mainstream press is all over it, with articles in WSJ, NYT, NPR, and CNN, among others.  Despite what it sounds like, quiet quitting isn’t ghosting your employer, just walking away from your job without a resignation or other declaration of leaving.  In fact, it doesn’t involve quitting at all.

Quiet quitting rejects the notion that workers are supposed to always try to go above and beyond.  It rejects the notion that work life is more important than life outside work. It encourages people to say “no’ more at work inside of automatically saying “yes” to requests that they take on more tasks or longer hours.  It doesn’t mean doing the bare minimum required to keep your job, but it insists on only doing the things the job requires and pays them to do, during the hours they’re supposed to be doing them. 

It's a Gen Z thing.  One 24 year-old TikToker, Zaid Khan, said: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life.”

No, no, no.
Healthcare, of course, shudders at the thought of quiet quitting.  What would happen if nurses wouldn’t work all those extra shifts?  What would have happened if doctors and other medical professionals had refused to see COVID-19 patients when PPE was lacking and no one quite knew how dangerous COVID was or how to treat it?  What would happen if primary care doctors stopped trying to fit 26 hours of work into a “normal” workday?  What would happen if physicians said it’s ridiculous that they have to spend two hours a day outside work hours on EHR tasks? 

Healthcare as we know it would fall apart…as maybe it should.

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Last but not least, sometimes healthcare professionals should be saying “no” loud and clear, as suggested in a NEJM Perspective by Matthew K. Wynia, M.D., M.P.H.: Professional Civil Disobedience — Medical-Society Responsibilities after Dobbs

The core question, Dr. Wynia, posits, is: “What should medical professionals do when a law requires them to harm a patient?”  He is referring, of course, to restrictions on medical practice imposed by various state abortion laws in the wake of the Dobbs decision.  He then asks the corollary question: “When these laws directly and immediately threaten the health of patients, should physicians collectively disobey them — that is, should they engage in professional civil disobedience?”

Healthcare has plenty of organizations that collectively claim to advocate for its constituents – the AMA, various specialty organizations, the American Nurses Association, and so on. Cynically, these are often used to argue to higher pay and/or better working conditions, rather than for the best interests of patients.  Sometimes they do take moral stances, including (as Dr. Wynia points out) their concerns about the implications of Dobbs.  But actually taking action, of threating work stoppages or boycotts?  That’s a step they rarely take, and one Dr. Wynia believes it is time for.

Credit: Francisco Kjolseth for The Salt Lake Tribune 

“Too often,” he laments, “organized medicine has failed to fulfill its duty to protect patients when doing so required acting against state authority.”  Dr. Wynia wonders: “How long could a dangerous state law survive if the medical profession, as a whole, refused to be intimidated into harming patients, even if such a refusal meant that many physicians might go to jail?” 

Not long, I’d bet.

The danger, he warns, is that: “…when a society takes a wrong turn and medical professionals go along, mistrust in medicine grows and either social change must be driven by other groups or the society fails.” 

In other words, time for the medical profession to say no, at least when it comes to any restrictions that impact the best care of their patients.

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Normally, I’m someone who is intrigued by new ideas, who is excited about innovation, who wants to see change – all things that signal saying “yes.”  But saying “yes” to too many things often effectively means implicitly saying no to most of them; we can only do so much at once, we can only accept so much change at a time.  Saying “no” more often, and more strategically, allows us to focus on the things we must say “yes” to.

In healthcare, patients are too often forced to accept “yes” to things they’d really like to say “no”
 to.  Physicians and other healthcare professionals are often forced to agree to work practices and restrictions that they know they should say “no” to.  And both patients and healthcare professionals are finding that legislators are acting in ways that are at odds with our best interests.

Time to say “no.”


Monday, August 22, 2022

Zap Away!

Speaking as a sometimes forgetful “senior citizen,” when I found out that non-invasively zapping brains with electricity can result in measurable improvements in memory, that’s something I’m going to remember.

Credit: Ward Sutton for Wired

I hope. 

In research published in Nature Neuroscience by Grover, et. al., a team lead by Boston University cognitive neuroscientist Robert Reinhart produced improvements in both long term and short term (working) memory through a series of weak electric stimulation – transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). The authors modestly claim: “Together, these findings suggest that memory function can be selectively and sustainably improved in older adults through modulation of functionally specific brain rhythms.”

The study provided the stimulation using something that looks like a swimming cap with electrodes, applied for twenty minutes a day for four days.  The population was 150 people, broken up into three separate experiments, all ages 65 to 88.

tACS device. Credit: Dr. Robert Reinhart
The results were amazing.  We can watch the memory improvements accumulate … with each passing day,” Dr. Reinhart marveled. 

Previous studies had suggested that long term and working memories had distinct mechanisms, in different parts of the brain, and this study seems to have demonstrated that fairly conclusively.  “We could improve either short-term or long-term memory separately,” Dr. Reinhart said. “And with this intervention across four consecutive days, we could change memory and watch the benefits accumulate over those days, which is striking.” 

Even more important, the gains persisted even a month later, with the greatest gains accruing to the participants who had the lowest cognitive function levels prior to the study.

That’s really one of the take home messages here—that it’s not just about stimulating a brain area, but it’s about stimulating a brain area at a specific frequency, so that it can then drive network communication,” Daniel Press, chief of the cognitive neurology unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told The Wall Street Journal.  (Dr. Press wasn’t involved in the research).

Other researchers not involved in the study were impressed.  “Their results look very promising,” says Ines Violante, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey. “They really took advantage of the cumulative knowledge within the field.”

“I was both impressed and surprised by this by this paper,” Simon Hanslmayr, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow,” said to Nature, with the results linked to “consistent and quite strong improvements in memory.”

“This is a really elegantly designed study,” Katharina Klink, a brain scientist at the University of Bern told StatNews. “These are such small currents that are being used, so to see effects on memory function after one month of not having any stimulation done to the brain, that’s quite impressive.” 

“I believe this is the future of neurologic intervention, to help strengthen networks in our brains that may be failing," Dr. Gayatri Devi, a clinical professor of neurology and psychiatry at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, told CNN. "Additionally, treatment may be tailored to each person, based on that individual's strengths and weaknesses, something pharmacotherapy is not able to do.”

This was a very short intervention which produced both an immediate effect and a very durable one,” Marom Bikson, a neural engineer at the City College of New York, told MIT Technology Review. “More research is needed, but if this works out it could be in every doctor’s office … and it could eventually be something that people use at home.” 

Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic in the Center for Brain Health at Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine, agrees, telling CNN: “In an ideal world, a portable at-home device that could offer this therapy would be the eventual goal.”

I’d buy one of those…and one for my wife.

We can hope for something like this...someday
The study differed from previous efforts in a couple of significant ways.  One was applying the tACS over a period of days, rather than in a single session.  The second was targeting seniors rather than younger people, whose memory issues may be harder to identify or modify. 

Dr. Reinhart prefers to refer to tACS as brain modulation rather than brain stimulation, since the currents are too low to trigger brain cells to fire.  “They’re noninvasive, safe, extremely weak levels of alternating current,” he stresses.  Moreover, he adds: “When the current is running, you feel like a mild tingling or itching or poking or warming sensation.”  “Zap” may be too strong a word.

Study coauthor Shrey Grover told Nature that future areas of research include whether the tACS can impact other memory tasks, whether the improvements persist longer than a month, and whether it could help people with conditions like Alzheimer’s. “We’re hoping that we can extend upon this work in meaningful ways and contribute more information about how the brain works,” Dr. Grover says.

The study is more evidence that our brains are not as fixed as once thought.  This plasticity is what allows the effects to be carried forward in time even when the stimulation has ended,” Dr. Grover told The Wall Street Journal.

By contrast with tACS, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been around for several years, with good success in treating conditions like Parkinson’s, dystonia, and, most recently, it had significant effects in treating depression in a small study from UTHealth Houston.  But, you know, DBS involves implanting electrodes in the brain, so that swimmer’s cap-like device looks a lot more appealing.

DBS implants -- umm, no thanks. Photo by Zephyr/Science Photo Library

We’re a long way from clinical trials or FDA approved devices for tACS, so if someone tries to sell you a brain stimulation cap, it’d be wise to be skeptical.  It will take more work to turn this into something that could actually help people with memory impairments,” said University of New Mexico neuroscientist Vincent Clark, who was not involved in the study.

But at some point in the future, yeah, we’re likely to have options like that.  As Dr. Reinhart told StatNews: “People are just overwhelmingly interested in augmenting their abilities to provide any kind of cutting-edge advantage.  I can imagine a future potentially where people are using stimulation.”

In the meantime, keep doing your Wordle, taking those walks, or swallowing your favorite (prescription or OTC) nootropic to help keep your memory fresh, but keep your hopes alive that a more effective, more targeted solution may be on the way. 

Monday, August 15, 2022

Tick Tock (or TikTok) for US Healthcare

Yes, I know Congress just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a big step forward in combating climate change that also has some important healthcare provisions (Medicare negotiating drug prices, anyone?), but, come on, TikTok is buying hospitals!  I can’t pass that up.


To be more accurate, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is actually buying hospitals, through two of its health subsidiaries.  As first reported by South China Morning Post, and subsequently confirmed as a $1.5b deal by Bloomberg, ByteDance bought Beijing-based Amcare Healthcare, which runs eight women’s and children’s hospitals in four Chinese cities.  As a private system, it targets expats and high income locals. 

This is not ByteDance’s first foray into healthcare; in 2020 it bought Xiaohe Medical, an internet hospital, as well as a medical information site and a telehealth service.  It is using its AI expertise to aid in drug discovery.  Its health business are under the umbrellas of Xiaohe Health and Xiaohe Health Technologies.

And you were excited about Amazon buying One Medical.   

Now, just to be clear, I don’t have a TikTok account and don’t think I’ve ever even see a TikTok video, but I’ve been tracking it since 2019. I first wrote about how it could be a harbinger for foreign competition in the U.S. healthcare system, then about the threat it posed to our privacy, and marveled at its evolving social influence, such as in political organizing or job searches.  Whether I like it or not, whether healthcare is ready for it or not, TikTok is here, and its role is steadily increasing.

Some experts view this latest investment not so much about ByteDance’s healthcare ambitions as its efforts to placate Chinese authorities, who have recently started stepping on tech companies who get too big (where are you, Jack Ma?) or who spend too much money overseas.  As Bloomberg noted:

The deal is also one of the largest to emerge from the Chinese tech industry since regulators began curbing “disorderly capital expansion” in late 2020, discouraging the sorts of big-ticket acquisitions that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. used in previous years to get into and dominate new markets.

I’ll leave the political-economic investment discussion to others more qualified, especially when those discussions are about the Chinese government and economy, and take ByteDance’s strategy at its face value.  It is interested in healthcare.  And I doubt that interest is only restricted to China.

The recent moves don’t make ByteDance a healthcare company any more than Amazon’s make it a healthcare company (yet), but let’s remember what ByteDance is.  It is not a social media company dabbling into healthcare as a potential future option, like Meta is doing with the metaverse.  It is an AI company that happens to run a social media company, as well as popular news service…and several health-related companies.  The AI is the common denominator, not the videos.  It is even selling its AI to other vendors (or maybe not). 

China has made AI a national priority, with huge investments, Big Data databases to work with, and applications in many public and private initiatives.  Healthcare is one of the areas of heavy AI investment.

Credit: Israel Innovation Authority

Even more than in the U.S., the pandemic has led to increased use of telehealth in China, and it makes sense that one of ByteDance’s early health investments was a telehealth company.    There are numerous large telehealth services in China, including Ping An Good Doctor, WeChat, JD Health, and Alibaba Health.  Online healthcare is already estimated to be a $89b market there, predicted to increase to $311b by 2026.  Keep in mind that, although China has a much bigger population, its healthcare spending is much lower, estimated to be under $1 trillion, so online health already makes up a big part.

China is certainly a huge market, but, unlike those others, ByteDance already has a big footprint outside China, though TikTok. It has the customers, it is learning their preferences, it is navigating the regulatory barriers, and, for better or for worse, it already has plenty of health information/misinformation.  If it wants to grow its healthcare business, should it fight for market share in China from more entrenched rivals, or should it eye markets elsewhere? 

I know what I’d be tempted to do. 

The hospitals it just purchased don’t necessarily offer services that are easily done online – e.g., obstetrics – but the insights into preferences of expat and high income locals should be useful as it thinks about expansion in other countries.  Add that to the online information, the telehealth, and the “internet hospital,” plus the underlying A.I. expertise, and it’s a pretty impressive array of healthcare capabilities.

Two of the most consistent themes I’ve had over the years are that AI is going to play a big role, including acting as a “doctor” in some respects, and that state/national restrictions are not going to be effective against online options.  As I said in the latter article:

State licensing made sense in a world where care was local, when physicians always saw their patients in person. We no longer live in that world…And just wait until we get A.I. doctors, who aren’t “located” anywhere in particular.

So I don’t particularly care that the hospitals ByteDance bought are only in China and only serve women and children.  I don’t care that I can’t currently easily access their other health options, such as consultations or information. I do care that it knows how to attract and engage customers, even in other countries, and that healthcare is an even bigger business outside China as in it. 

Credit: TikTok

It may not be ByteDance that breaks the national barriers and comes to the U.S. to challenge our healthcare system.  Such an entry may not even come from China. But it is coming, from somewhere.  Whoever it is may not only not respect our borders, but also not our regulations or our payment mechanisms. 

Make fun of “TikTok hospitals” all you want, pretend TikTok is just another Facebook or YouTube, and assume our healthcare system is going to evolve under our direction.  Me, I suspect there’s going to be some “punctured equilibrium” in which many of our existing healthcare entities may not survive.

Monday, August 8, 2022

Caring Does Not Pay

Things are tough all over the job market.  With a jobless rate at 3.5%, and with millions of people who left the job market in 2020 opting to not return to work, employers are having a hard time finding workers.  Your favorite restaurant or retail store probably has a “Help Wanted” sign out.  Checking your bag for a flight has never been more problematic, in large part  due to staffing issues.  Even tech companies are having trouble hiring.


But I want to focus on a crisis in hiring for three industries that take care of some of our most vulnerable populations – teaching, child care, and nursing.  It seems that what we say we want for our kids and the sick isn’t at all what we actually do to ensure that. 

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Let’s start with teaching.  The Washington Post declared last week that we have a “catastrophic teacher shortage.”  Do a google search on “teacher shortage” and then pick whatever state you want; chances are, you’ll find a result for it.

“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, told the WaPo. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts.” 

States are being “creative” about filling these gaps.  Arizona is allowing schools to hire college students who are still working on their degree, and Florida is allowing veterans to teach even if they lack a bachelor’s degree.  As Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, told WaPo, “I think we all appreciate what our military veterans have done for our country in terms of protecting our freedoms both here and abroad.  But just because you were in the military does not mean you will be a great teacher.”

As for the cause of the shortage, WaPo noted:

Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

“The political situation in the United States, combined with legitimate aftereffects of covid, has created this shortage,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told WaPo. “This shortage is contrived.”

Teaching used to be a highly respected, decently paid profession, especially when women didn’t have many other professional options (it still is 76% female), but we’ve somehow allowed it to become an underpaid (the median salary is $51,000), under-resourced (94% of public school teachers spend their own money on school supplies), under-appreciated (the U.S. ranks 16th in the world for how it values teaching relative to other professions) job. 

But, hey, it’s all about the kids, right?



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Speaking of kids, the child care industry is in a state of collapse.  As Elliot Haspel put it in The Atlantic,  America’s fragile child-care equilibrium has shattered…Demand is high, but supply is woefully low.”

Compared to pre-pandemic, there are between 85,000 and 120,000 fewer jobs, some 16,000 programs are estimated to have closed, and yet remaining programs struggle to find workers – perhaps because median pay hovers around $13/hour.  Eighty percent of programs report staffing shortages, largely due to the low compensation.

TODAY illustration/Getty Images
That’s not to say that child care is cheap, of course; just the opposite.  Required staffing ratios and other regulations make child care exceedingly expensive for parents.  The average cost of daycare is about $220 per child per week, or about $1,000 per month.  That’s 10% of the median income for a married couple, and 35% for a single parent.

It’s a problem for the economy generally.  Rochelle Wilcox, CEO of a network of child care centers in Louisiana, told US News & World Report: “We are hand in hand with the economy, and we are just not respected as such. … Doctors, lawyers, nurses, sanitation workers – none of those people can go to work if they don’t have anywhere to put their children.”

Mr. Haspel pointed out:

It must be noted that these low wages are paid to a workforce that is almost entirely women and disproportionately women of color. The workforce’s low pay cannot be disentangled from complex societal questions of who’s responsible for providing care and whether care work is both valuable and worthy of respect. 

He’s got that right.

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Speaking of care, if you want a crisis, look no further than nursing.  The New York Times proclaimed: “In the flood of resignations, retirements and shortages that have redefined workplaces across industries these past two years, nothing has been as dramatic or as consequential as the shifts taking place in nursing. 

Once again, this disproportionately impacts women; 86% of U.S. nurses are women.   

How about this: a 2021 survey found that 90% of hospital nurses are considering leaving in the next year.  The pandemic is a major but not the only reason; nurses are overworked, face too many administrative burdens, and feel too much of their work is unnecessarily manual.

“What hospital leaders must take away from this data is that much of your nursing staff has an eye on the door,” said Shawn Sefton, Chief Nursing Officer and VP Client Operations at Hospital IQ. “…the frightening reality is that come 2022, hospitals will reach a novel level of short-staffed, and it will have horrendous repercussions on our health system and the patients reliant on it.” Well, we’re in 2022, and Ms. Sefton was right.

According to polls, nursing is the most respected profession, and has been for the last twenty years.  When you’re in that hospital bed, she’s mostly likely the one who comforts you.  Unfortunately, she’s also the one who doesn’t come as fast as you’d like, because she’s got too many other patients, she’s the one probably tired from long shifts, and she’s the one who has been yelled at (or worse) by anti-vaxxers, disagreeable patients, or even supercilious physicians.   

It's a credit to the profession that any of the nurses stay. 

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We say we value education.  We say we love children. We say that nurses are angels.  We’re think that we’re a caring people. We just don’t treat the people in the jobs that demonstrate those values as though those were true, and a large part of me wonders the extent to which that is because they are mostly women.   

Monday, August 1, 2022

You Need Some Smarter Clothing

Much as I’d love to write about Instagram’s feud with the Kardashians over changes to the Instagram feed, and how that and proposed changes to Facebook’s feed reflect Meta’s efforts to combat TikTok’s growing influence, I’ve already given healthcare plenty of warnings about TikTok.  Instead, I’ll write about something else that the Kardashians care about: fashion.

Well, not fashion per se, but clothing. If the old, sexist statement was “clothes make the man,” then soon we may be saying “clothes make your health.”

Credit: Butler Technologies

The Washington Post
got my attention when it reported last week about robotic clothing, because, as anyone who has been reading me for long knows, I am fascinated by robots and their role in healthcare.  One of the advances the article discussed is work on “smart fluid textiles” done by Dr. Thanh Nho Do and colleagues at the University of New South Wales Medical Robotics lab.

The UNSW press released described the efforts as:

Engineers have developed a new class of smart textiles that can shape-shift and turn a two-dimensional material into 3D structures...These artificial muscles, which are surrounded by a helical coil of traditional fibres, can be programmed to contract or expand into a variety of shapes depending on its initial structure.

Dr. Do said: “These ‘smart fluid textiles’ take the advantage of hydraulic pressure and add the fast response, lightweight, high flexibility and small size of soft artificial muscles. In effect, we have given our smart textiles the expansion and contraction ability in the exact same way as human muscle fibres.” 

Here’s a video:


The team sees all sorts of health-related applications: 
We propose it can be used to develop new medical compression devices, for example, that are low-profile and lead to better medical outcomes. Patients with poor blood circulation could benefit from smart garments that contract to apply desired pressure to superficial veins and assist blood supply.

Athletes also use compression garments to recover at a faster rate and reduce muscle soreness after training, and our smart textile has potential to be utilised in that area.

We envision our material could be used to develop soft exoskeletons to enable people with disabilities to walk again or augment the human performance.

I mean, why wear one of those bulky robot exoskeletons that other researchers have developed when you can wear a nice pair of pants made from smart fluid textiles?  As the study’s first author Phuoc Thien Phan bragged, “Normal robots cannot change their shape or start off as a two-dimensional flat material to be able to access small spaces and then morph into a three-dimensional object.”

The Post spoke to Yoel Fink, a materials science professor at MIT who is working on related efforts.  He sees robotic clothing as a new frontier: “We’re sort of at the pre-iPhone announcement [stage]. It’s very, very exciting.  He went on to explain: “Software is going to determine what services you’re receiving, and that thing is going to look like your T-shirt and your pants that you’re wearing right now.”

Dr. Fink’s team has done work on programable fibers and flexible fiber batteries that can be woven into textiles.   Earlier this year, another MIT team working with Dr. Fink, led by Wei Yan, developed “acoustical fabric,” which works like a microphone.  It can pick up external sounds, like conversations, or internal sounds, like heartbeats.  Think wearable hearing aids or for continuous vital signs tracking. 

Dr. Yan, who is now an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, believes:

Wearing an acoustic garment, you might talk through it to answer phone calls and communicate with others. In addition, this fabric can imperceptibly interface with the human skin, enabling wearers to monitor their heart and respiratory condition in a comfortable, continuous, real-time, and long-term manner.

This is important, because, as Dr. Fink poetically told Tech Briefs:

Our fibers or fabrics capture, in some ways, the soundtrack of our lives. Every time your heart beats, every time you take a breath, every time you bend your arm, every time you walk, every time a joint moves, every time blood flows, there’s sound. The fabrics capture all of that. All that sound gets into a fabric and is lost during the day.

The military is paying attention.  There is already a DoD program SMART ePANTS (someone there has a sense of humor!), “ePANTS” standing for “Electrically Powered And Networked Textile Systems.  It aims to have smart textiles that can collect, analyze, and transmit information real-time.

Another team at MIT, led by Xuanhe Zhao in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is working on something that isn’t clothing per se, but is something you wear -- an ultrasound sticker.

It is described as “a stamp-sized device that sticks to skin and can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours…the devices produced live, high-resolution images of major blood vessels and deeper organs such as the heart, lungs, and stomach.”  Forget needing an ultrasound machine, much less a technician to operate it; you’d just wear these stickers, providing live, real-time images. The next goal is to make it wireless as well, adding to the convenience.

“We envision a few patches adhered to different locations on the body, and the patches would communicate with your cellphone, where AI algorithms would analyze the images on demand,” Dr. Zhao said. “We believe we’ve opened a new era of wearable imaging: With a few patches on your body, you could see your internal organs.”

 Here’s their video:


And it’s not just fabrics.  Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a “smart necklace.”  It is a battery-free, wireless biochemical sensor that can analyze sweat to monitor glucose levels, with expectations that it will eventually track other biomarkers in sweat. Co-author Jinghua Li says: “The next generation of biosensors will be so highly bio-intuitive and non-invasive that we’ll be able to detect key information contained in a person’s body fluids.”    

Dr. Li believes the sensors will eventually become thin enough to be placed into our – you guessed it! – clothing. 

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Dr. Fink thinks that current wearables, such as in smartwatches, have limited adoption possibilities, because “I think we prefer to walk around with the least amount of stuff that we can,” as he told Tech Briefs.  Instead, he is a proponent of what he terms Fabric Computing.  “The days of the computer or phone in a glass box in our pocket or pocketbook are numbered,” he predicts. “The future of computing is in fabrics.”