Imagine that you hurt your knee.
You go to the doctor, who attaches tiny microphones to his leg and, carefully listening to the noises, and makes preliminary conclusions on the spot.
Such a fantastic picture can become a daily practice thanks to the work of engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States.
The crunch in the knee in the morning can sound awesome, but inside the knee joint there are constant sounds that we just do not always notice. Normal sounds can be distinguished from unusual, pathological with the help of special equipment.
Development of Georgia Tech employees is a system of microphones and film vibration sensors that are superimposed on the patient's leg and connected to a computer.
The software designed for these purposes interprets any sounds when moving in the knee and helps the doctor, without leaving the room, diagnose - from meniscus damage to the initial stage of arthrosis. In the future, such a sensitive and convenient apparatus will allow to detect and control the progression of diseases of the knee joint.
The creator of technology Omer Inan (Omer Inan) himself is not the first year suffering from knee pain, because of which he took up the development of the original device.
Now an inventor and teacher of electrical engineering, this muscular man in the past was a first-class discus thrower, holder of three records - the All-American, Stanford Student and NCAA. For years he spun around the axis like a tornado, for which our knees are not at all suitable, adding to this squats with a 200-kilogram barbell, and eventually paid for his hobby.
Inana's work was funded by the government agency DARPA, which deals with technology for the US Army.
The military hopes with the help of a new stethoscope to quickly examine soldiers who have been injured on the battlefield, track recovery after surgery, and also to identify degenerative joint diseases in elderly veterans.
Stethoscope for the knee joint will be an excellent pair for MRI.
Recall that in 2010, British scientists from the University of Lancaster and the University of Central Lancaster worked on a similar prototype, trying to "hear" osteoarthritis of the knee joint. But the fate of this project has not been reported for a long time.
medbe. en.
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