Monitoring

Monitoring of a patient’s health status is important not only for those recovering from operations and treatment, but also for the routine check-up of healthy individuals. Point-of-care (POC) devices offer an unprecedented degree of flexibility through the measurement of many different physiological factors such as blood pressure, blood chemistry (e.g. levels of sugars, hormones, antibodies in the blood), heart rate, and body temperature at the patient’s location without the need to send samples off to the lab.

For more complicated tests, POC devices can incorporate Lab-On-A-Chip devices (pictured left) which allow tens or hundreds of different biomolecules to be measured rapidly. By measuring quickly and at the patient’s location, doctors avoid the risk of losing samples, waiting days for results to come back from the lab, and misdiagnosing due to samples being stored or treated incorrectly. This allows the correct treatment to be given quickly and gives a portability that allows diagnosis of disease in remote areas (such as HIV infection in developing countries).

In the future such devices may be linked wirelessly to a computer in the doctor’s office, allowing patients to monitor themselves from the comfort of their own home and only attend the doctor if a change in treatment is required.