The Body Electric

Implanted wireless devices and real-tine information hold promise for empowering patients and providing better care.

By Katie Neith
Spring 2008

Innovative wireless technologies are set to improve doctor-patient communication and change the way health care is managed in America.

“I think networked devices hold the promise of liberating medical information and providing more complete and better care for patients,” says Leslie Saxon, M.D., chief of the division of cardiovascular medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

Body computing—any implanted wireless device that transmits medical data from the body to another wireless device such as a computer or cell phone—has the potential to revolutionize the way patients and doctors interact.

“The communication gap between patients and physicians is one of the biggest problems we face in the health care industry, and I think body computing holds an enormous amount of promise in helping tackle this issue,” Saxon says.

She points out that making medical information continuously accessible to patients, their families and caretakers, as well as their entire medical team, empowers patients to take control of their medical condition. Body computing may even enable patients to treat themselves in some situations—similar to diabetics who monitor and treat their own blood sugar levels.

Multi-Tasking Medicine  “In the current, traditional model of medicine, a physician might see a patient every three months. With implanted body computing devices relaying real-time information, physicians can continuously ‘see’ their patients,” Saxon explains.

“Furthermore, the patients can manage symptoms, check vital health statistics and share that information with other people.”

She says that in some areas, such as cardiology, the technology is already available to make body computing a reality.

For example, Saxon is currently principal investigator of a clinical trial that implants networked defibrillators—small, battery-powered electrical impulse generators that detect and treat cardiac arrhythmias. The defibrillator is wirelessly connected to a blood pressure gauge and a weight scale—two measures that indicate how the heart muscle is functioning. The information gathered from the defibrillator is then transmitted directly to physicians, who can monitor the patient from a remote location for changes in heart function.

“We are looking at how combined network information, delivered wirelessly to physicians with the ability to alert them of major changes, can impact overall practice, number of hospitalizations, etc.,” Saxon says.
By treating a patient at the first warning signs of a problem, physicians could significantly reduce hospitalizations, which cause the majority of costs associated with chronic diseases, she says.

Saxon and her research team also are planning several studies with sensors placed all over the body to measure different physiologic data.

Adopt Change Wisely  “We are sort of where the Internet was in 1994. It changed a wide span of things, from media to music, and now we’re trying to see how it is going to change medicine,” Saxon says. “The biggest challenge is learning how to adopt it wisely.”

Another challenge is getting a number of key players involved to open the doors for cross communication.

“There is amazing potential in networked implanted devices, but we need everyone on board—the FDA, medical technology developers, investors, patients and physicians,” Saxon says.

A Body Computing Conference at USC in the Fall was a first step in bringing researchers, innovators and investors to the table to discuss the abundance of possibilities that lie in implanted wireless devices.

“I’m championing body computing because I think that it’s going to be one of the fundamental answers to the health care problems in America,” Saxon says. “We spend a lot of money, we have the best specialists and the best technology—we need to keep that alive and vibrant, but the bottom line is that we have to make it work for the patients.”

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