An interdisciplinary team from Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago developed and clinically tested soft, flexible, miniaturized sensors that gently adhere to the child’s forehead to wirelessly monitor changes in cerebral blood flow and oxygenation, to alert clinicians of potential need to intervene and restore equilibrium.
“In our study, we validated the safety, accuracy and precision of these sophisticated wireless devices during continuous monitoring of pediatric patients, from infants to teenagers,” says co-senior author Debra E Weese-Mayer, MD, who led the clinical testing at Lurie Children’s. Dr. Weese-Mayer heads the division of Pediatric Autonomic Medicine and the Center for Autonomic Medicine in Pediatrics (CAMP) at Lurie Children’s and she is a Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “These new sensors will advance current state-of-the-art clinical practices for investigation of cerebral auto-regulation.
Replacing the tangle of wires that come with traditional monitoring devices, the new sensors and others designed in the Rogers laboratory/Weese-Mayer laboratory collaboration allow comfortable movement and simultaneous, continuous measures of cerebral and systemic hemodynamics, including cerebral oxygenation, heart rate, peripheral oxygenation, as well as vascular pulse pressure and tone. Such monitoring is essential for low birth-weight premature babies and children with congenital heart disease, traumatic brain injury, auto-regulatory disorders, and other patients at high risk for impaired cerebral autoregulation and long-term neurological damage.
