Continuous imaging of cardiac functions is highly desirable for the assessment of long-term cardiovascular health, detection of acute cardiac dysfunction and clinical management of critically ill or surgical patients1–4. However, conventional non-invasive approaches to image the cardiac function cannot provide continuous measurements owing to device bulkiness5–11, and existing wearable cardiac devices can only capture signals on the skin12–16. Here we report a wearable ultrasonic device for continuous, real-time and direct cardiac function assessment. We introduce innovations in device design and material fabrication that improve the mechanical coupling between the device and human skin, allowing the left ventricle to be examined from different views during motion. We also develop a deep learning model that automatically extracts the left ventricular volume from the continuous image recording, yielding waveforms of key cardiac performance indices such as stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fraction. This technology enables dynamic wearable monitoring of cardiac performance with substantially improved accuracy in various environments.
Pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs) have been a workhorse in diverse applications from the repair of objects to heavy-duty industrial use due to their unique capability to form near-instant and robust yet repeatable adhesion to a wide range of engineering solids via physical bonding. While these characteristics of PSAs are highly favorable in various biomedical applications, commercial PSAs lack adhesion to wet tissue surfaces. Moreover, existing bioadhesives are mostly limited to single-use applications incapable of repeated adhesion and repositioning due to the irreversible nature of chemical adhesion. In this work, we introduce a pressure-sensitive bioadhesive (PSB) that synergistically combines the advantages of viscoelastic PSAs and bioadhesives. Enabled by a one-pot scalable copolymerization of a poly(glycerol sebacate)-co-poly(ethylene glycol) (PGS-co-PEG) block copolymer, the PSB provides near-instant (~ 1 s), robust, and repeatable (over 1,000 times) adhesion to wet biological tissues (i.e., skin, lung, heart) and engineering (i.e., metals, plastics) substrates without prior surface functionalization. We further demonstrate in vitro and in vivo biocompatibility and biodegradability of the PSB and its potential applications as a surgical sealant and the rapid, robust, and repositionable integration of biomedical devices with wet dynamic organs in rat and porcine models.
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