US-based digital health company STAT Health has launched a 24 /7 in-ear general wellness product that measures blood flow to the head to better understand body conditions that occur while standing.
As the world’s smallest wearable technology, this technology can treat symptoms such as dizziness, brain fog, headache, fainting and fatigue often associated with conditions such as prolonged covid syndrome, postural orthostatic tachycardia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, where blood rushes to the head.
These diseases affect more than 13 million Americans. The wearable device was clinically tested at Johns Hopkins and a preliminary review was published in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
It can predict when a person is about to faint minutes before it happens, and can be used in more than 90 percent of devices in or around the ear. It can also be left on while sleeping and showering, which means the device turns off and you forget to change less.
Entrepreneur and founder of STAT Healthcare, Daniel Lee has been developing in-ear devices since graduating college after working with Bose on their Sleepbud product.
Previous studies using ultrasound have shown that cerebral blood flow is a key biomarker that objectively measures the presence and severity of many invisible diseases.
The STAT technique uses an optical probe instead of ultrasound and taps the inferior auricular artery to measure ultrasound-guided cerebral blood flow exchange points near the brain and large arteries.
This positioning also frees it from the complications of arm movement, which can prevent current wearable trackers from heart measurements during many daily activities. Despite its small scale, the device includes advanced optical sensors, an accelerometer, a pressure sensor, temperature sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) edge computing, a 3-day battery life and a micro-solar panel. The product connects to the app and shows the user how heart rates, blood pressure trends and head blood flow change while standing.
