THEME FROM IDEA TO INDUSTRY
ITOM MEDICAL TRANSPLANTS ITS BIOMETRIC SENSING PLATFORM TO A CHIP Having proven itself again and again in medical research systems, the time has come for ItoM Medical’s amplification and signal processing technology to be cast into an integrated design. The move will improve cost and performance but also open up new possibilities. Paul van Gerven
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yes wide open, forehead beading with sweat and chest heaving violently – as anyone working in an intensive care unit will confirm, patients on mechanical ventilation aren’t always as still as you might think. Even when unconscious, a (perceived) lack of oxygen triggers a violent reaction of panic in a patient, who instinctively starts fighting for his life. It’s a very distressing experience, for both the patient and the medical staff. ‘Fighting the ventilator’ has many possible causes. A patient’s condition can change, the ventilator settings can be wrong or a tube can get clogged by secretions in the lungs. But frequently, no such obvious causes can be found. In that case, asynchrony between the patient’s own breathing rhythm and that of the ventilator may have provoked the potentially life-threatening condition. “For years, people have tried to come up with a solution for this quite common problem, but it’s very difficult to solve. Typically, a pressure or airflow sensor in the nose is used to predict the breathing pattern, but since there’s a significant delay between the patient’s starting to inhale and detecting it in the nose, it can still go wrong,” says Jurryt Vellinga, co-founder and CEO of ItoM Medical, a Dutch electronics design house that has developed breathing monitoring solutions that have proven to be much more effective at 28
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preventing respiratory distress on the ventilator. Now, ItoM Medical is gearing up to take the technology that underlies the breathing monitoring systems to the next level: a fully integrated application-specific standard product (ASSP) that will power a whole range of clinical monitoring systems as well as applications beyond the medical domain.
Cacophony
ItoM Medical’s main specialty is electrophysiology, ie performing electrical measurements on the human body. Building on technology that has had about 40 years to mature, the Dutch company supplies high-performance biometric sensing technology. “Through a combination of sophisticated amplification technology and clever signal processing, we can perform electrical activity measurements with unprecedented accuracy,” explains Vellinga.
The breathing monitoring platform aptly illustrates how good ItoM Medical’s technology really is, since measuring breathing patterns is a lot harder than most other electrophysiological measurements, such as the well-known electrocardiograms (ECG) and electroencephalograms (EEG). This is due to the fact that electrical signals from the ‘key breathing muscle’ – the diaphragm – are almost completely drowned out by the heart. One possible work-around is to bring a sensor in close proximity to the diaphragm by inserting a probe into the esophagus, but according to Vellinga, that’s not a good solution. “While it may seem like just another tube down the patient’s throat, mechanical ventilation is increasingly performed using a mask. It would be a contradiction to move away from intubation yet introduce another invasive probe.” Thanks to its amplification technology, ItoM Medical can pick up the ItoM Medical’s IC enables the design of extremely small and accurate medical systems, with a long operating time and a limited number of external components. Credit: ItoM Medical
