This (video) looks really cool.
With economies of scale, I’m sure the Chinese will have it under $100 in no time.
I don’t see how it could have as much impact now as the stethoscope did then. In 1816 (that’s when it was invented) we went from not having a stethoscope to having one. Now, we’d be going from having one to…still having one? People (mis)diagnosing themselves?
Don’t get me wrong, I’d probably buy one if it were a hundred dollars (and worked with Android, not just iOS), but I don’t know that it’s going to revolutionize medicine. Especially considering most office that need one on a regular basis already have it and with ones that don’t you can probably still get scanned inside of an hour by going to the radiology suite down the hall, an ER or even an urgent care.
A quick skim of the video in the linked article suggests that they’re hoping every general practitioner will keep them on them (like a stethoscope) and scan everyone as part of their routine.
That would be interesting. Only because I’d be slightly (but not overly) concerned about over(?) diagnosis. That is, catching things that aren’t presenting any symptoms and will likely clear up on their own. ie, a small ovarian cyst that you didn’t know you had and will be gone in a few days or weeks or a tear in your shoulder that you didn’t know about and it never bothered you and suddenly you’re getting surgical referrals.
I don’t know, maybe every doctor will have one on them and it’ll be a good thing. We’ll have to wait and see.
You’ve got to allow for sales hyperbole. But think, for example, about the use in pregnancy - if the baby stops moving then the mother can get an instant check, foetal growth can be monitored better, etc. And in sports injuries you can check if that toe / metacarpal / other bone is broken on the field rather than having to go to hospital. Etc ad nauseam.
Those are, at the same time, going to end up with people misdiagnosing themselves. Worried expectant mothers already make plenty of extra visits to the doctor because they think there’s an issue. Imagine how much more they’ll go because they don’t know how to read a sonogram and think there’s something wrong with the baby.
Similarly, a coach or ‘health professional’ may look at a player’s knee, not see any thing and send him back out on the field.
In the hands of a trained professional, I’m sure it’s fine. My concern would be more with the untrained using it and making bad medical decisions.
Of course, it’s also entirely possible that no matter how cheap it is, you may never see it on Amazon or the likes. It’ll probably be marketed only to medical types through already established sales/marketing/distribution channels. ie, talk to your Siemens or GE rep.
You could say the same about the stethoscope.
Really, how much cheaper do they make the device by off-loading the processing and touchscreen to a phone instead of having it built-in? 50 bucks? Less? Sounds like a marketing gimmic.
FWIW, my cardiologist mentioned that the entire profession is dreading the inevitable deluge of hypochondriacs, now that Apple has an actual EKG built into the Apple Watch.
Yeah, “do your own ultrasound” sounds like an awful, terrible idea. It’s not like it’s obvious at all what you’re looking at with an ultrasound, even with something as clear as a near-term baby. Doctors will be swamped with people demanding an immediate appointment because they saw something they didn’t understand with their U-do-it ultrasound tool.
It may have as much impact on medical care as the stethoscope did, but in exactly the opposite direction.
A smaller, cheaper, more portable device that still does the job of the old large, expensive device is good. It means that more trained health professionals can have access to them, in more contexts. But putting them in the hands of untrained laymen won’t accomplish anything, unless they’ve made the things so idiot-proof that they don’t need trained professionals. Now, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that they’ve done that: Automatic defibrillators, for instance, are an example of medical equipment that used to require a professional but which now can be used by a layman, and they’ve saved lives. But I’d have to see some pretty solid evidence before I’d agree that they’ve done it.
In the hands of a trained professional a stethoscope isn’t going to be used for much more than listening to a heart (or as part of checking your own blood pressure), not checking to see if your unborn baby is still alive or DIY bone fracture diagnosis.
I guess, other than putting off seeing a doctor, a home ultrasound machine isn’t going to give you the ability to actively harm yourself like, say, an at home defib (without all the built in safety controls).
In this case, it’s just a tool to look at things, like a microscope or [weight] scale.
And just to reiterate, if they actually came down far enough in price for the average person to afford…yeah, I’d probably buy one.
Any non medical uses?
Yeah! Can I look in my walls for plumbing and wiring and whatnot?
Maybe the Walabot can be used on people?
Ultrasound is cool and useful. But medical ultrasounds require quite a bit of practice and expertise to use properly. Most medical ultrasound images would be pretty useless to lay folk because you need to be able to compare it to more standardized images to look for pathology or see if measurements are out of whack. However, most people would find it cool and interesting to follow a pregnancy using ultrasound, as long as you don’t over interpret the images and they don’t cause undue anxiety.
If the price came down far enough, I could see organizations that require safety personnel for events getting one for their safety kits, to help on-site personnel check for broken bones. They’d have to add some fracture sonography material to their training, but it could be useful.
A similar advance in tech was the availability of at-home Doppler units for amplifying foetal heart beats. My OB gave so many caveats that I decided not to get one, although as a very anxious pregnant person, I was right smack in the target audience. I agreed with my doc, that it would cause more stress than it eased.
Having recently had a bunch of prenatal ultrasounds, most on the super fancy units at the maternal foetal medicine department, driven by specially-trained techs… Most of the time the screen looked to me, the naive observer, like a snowstorm on an asteroid. I don’t know that an at-home unit would be any use without extensive training.
But your phone could record the video and you could then send that to the medical professionals. Which saves them the time of coming out to you. Or you could stream it to them.
I just had an ultra sound and it cost me nothing and was assessed by a professional. I am lucky I guess but it is something I would never use- how would I know if I was even scanning the correct area?
Um, maybe the use case is for trained professionals to use them in poor areas in poor countries, where the cell phone infrastructure is robust, but none other is?
It actually worked out for one guy: An Apple Watch told a 46-year-old man he had an irregular heartbeat. It was right.
Note that he first thought it was malfunctioning and tried a few different things before he actually went to the doctor.