BioE graduate student Mozzi Etemadi and his team have been awarded $110,000 to explore development of an enhanced bathroom scale to monitor the health of heart failure patients.
The researchers have found that even a normal bathroom scale can register the body’s recoil from the force of the heartbeat pumping blood through our arteries. The team will now build prototypes of bathroom scales modified to measure that effect, use it to accurately determine how much blood the heart pumps with each beat, and wirelessly transmit the data to remote data storage where it can be accessed and assessed by the patient’s physician.
The team — Etemadi, UCSF medical student Kendra Johnson, primary care advisor Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer, Dr. Teresa De Marco, Dr. Dana McGlothlin, Dr. Liviu Klein, clinical study coordinator Rebecca Grossman-Kahn, and clinical advisor Dr. Margaret Wheeler — won second place in the 2012 Prize for Primary Healthcare awarded by the Boston-based Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and funded by the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust.
Read more at the UCSF School of Pharmacy.