Last week, My family and I were in urgent care for a solid 12 hours. It was CRAZY. It was an experience I hope I never have to go through again, although I probably will. At around 8:30 pm, my family and I went to Kaiser’s urgent care because I had been experiencing stomach pain for the past couple of days. We ended up having to be transferred to Mary Bridge because I needed an ultrasound which Kaiser wasn’t able to provide so they could check for ovarian torsion and appendicitis. Luckily, I didn’t have either of those, I just had a kidney stone. That’s beside the point. The point is that I needed an ultrasound.

I recently read an article in Science Daily that said that Engineers at MIT designed an adhesive ultrasound path that can provide 48 hours of imaging. Click here to read the full article. This new technology would transform the world of medicine. Compared to conventional ultrasounds, these stickers are much less painful. I know from experience that an ultrasound can be very painful, as it hurts when the technician pushes on your stomach with a lot of force with the tools they use to see inside your stomach.

This new technology would also benefit anyone in need of an ultrasound because the patch would be wireless and allow the wearer to move around while the patch is stuck on. Not only would this benefit the wearer, but it would also benefit the doctors in charge of the patient because the patch allows the patient to move around while granting the doctor the ability to look at the patient’s internal organs while doing various activities that stimulate the use of different muscles.

In addition to these ultrasound patches allowing the patient more comfort, and providing the technicians and doctors with more imaging, this new technology would also eliminate the use of liquid gel because the patches already contain a sticky adhesive that allows the doctors to see into the body. No liquid gel also means that the technician can have more constant imaging, meaning that there is no need to reapply liquid gel if there is a long-lasting sticky patch.

These adhesive imaging patches also allow doctors to perform ultrasounds on multiple patients at a time. This is because, with the current ultrasound machines, there is only one machine per technician, meaning only one patient can be imaged at a time. With these patches, the technician can stick them onto multiple patients so that the same tech can look at all the imaging at once. this allows multiple patients to receive an ultrasound at the same time, making the ultrasound process more efficient.

All in all, I am super excited to see how these ultrasound patches evolve and technology becomes more advanced! If these adhesive imaging patches become the next biggest thing, then I support them 100%.