Podcast: How Traditional Chinese Medicine Is Shaping Modern Wearables

In this episode, we explore how traditional Chinese medicine has inspired the development of innovative pulse sensor technology and discover how ancient wisdom and modern tech are coming together to revolutionize health monitoring and diagnostics.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(3:44) - Traditional Chinese Medicine Inspires Better Wearables

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about how solid state batteries will change the wearables for the better in the coming years!

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Transcript

Hey friends, on today's podcast episode, we're talking about something that's thousands of years old. I know we're always talking about something that's new, something that was discovered a few weeks ago and how it might make an impact. But I think this is really interesting. We're talking about a team from Penn State that took inspiration from a Chinese medicine method that's over three millennia old and are able to make an impact on people with life-saving devices today.

What's up friends, this is the NextByte podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Daniel: What's up friends? Like we said, today we're talking about a method from traditional Chinese medicine that's over 3,000 years old that's helping us inspire better wearables today, which is super interesting. But before we talk specifically about these medical wearables, I want to talk about the state of wearables as a whole in today's sponsor, which is Mouser Electronics. Mouser is one of the largest suppliers, largest electronics distributors and suppliers in the world. One of the awesome things that they get as a result of this relationship that they have with so many different companies and so many different researchers is solid insight on what the future of certain technologies might look like. One trend is changing from one certain tech to the other and they publish awesome articles about it that are easy to understand, which is why we like working with them so well. In today's show notes, we're going to link an article from them about the future of wearables and the future of wearable batteries specifically. The future of solid-state batteries, which are safer, more energy dense, and they're smaller, as opposed to other types of batteries like lithium ion, which have a liquid electrolyte. Solid state batteries have a solid electrolyte. And so, companies are still trying to figure out exactly how to best manufacture with solid state batteries, but this is essentially going to be the major unlock for wearables that are thin, that are small, that are light, but have a long battery life. And they're essentially calling it today. The future of wearables is gonna be solid state batteries. So, if you're interested in wearables or interested in battery technology, you should check out the link in our show notes.

Farbod: Totally agree.

Daniel: Anything else to add on that?

Farbod: Yeah, I was gonna say, right now, there's this big battle of EVs, and a lot of that, the competition is with cost. Solid state batteries are a key component of that competition. And I think BYD, the Chinese manufacturer, has been making a lot of great progress on their solid-state batteries, and the American companies are trying to keep up with them. So, this is definitely gonna be-..

Daniel: I texted you in the last week about BYD too.

Farbod: Oh yeah, you did.

Daniel: Nellie and I are just flew into Paris, and we're coming out of the airport, and I saw a huge banner for BYD while we're in the road. I'm like, man, I have never seen an advertisement for a Chinese car company. Cause in the U S there's like lots of terrorists and stuff trying to prevent Chinese car companies from taking over. I'm like, man, BYD like, and actually a ton of Chinese EVs downtown in Paris and also in Amsterdam have big showrooms. I'm like, man, this is, this is the future. Like these people are making incredible looking cars with high performance and low cost. Like, competition is there. Everyone's gonna step up, which is awesome.

Farbod: So yeah, if you're interested in battery tech in general, EVs, wearables, whatever, definitely make sure you check out this article. Mouser's articles have been pretty spot on. I think a couple of episodes ago, we mentioned how one of their resources kind of predicted this trend that was oncoming that we discussed in the episode. So yeah, check it out.

Daniel: Yeah, all right, with that, let's continue our discussion about the company or the country China and future technology which is a traditional Chinese medicine method, which has inspired Penn State researchers to rethink about the way that we do pulse monitoring in wearable technology. And they're trying to take inspiration from this previous method, it's over 3,000 years old, which used wrist pulse checks at not just one spot, but also three different spots with different levels of pressure, which helped someone with just their fingers to get a pretty good calibrated reading on how someone's heart was doing. And so, in this case, they're trying to solve the problem with current pulse sensors, which are that wearables aren't super accurate. Pulse signals change a lot between different people during the day, depending on what types of activities you're on, depending on what type of posture you're using. One of the things that I've noticed is I wear a Garmin watch for activity tracking and they give you a big disclaimer. They're like, if you're doing anything where you're flexing your forearm, as in weightlifting or riding a bike, it's not going to get very accurate readings. And not only is this a problem for people using activity monitoring, it's a big problem for people who need to understand how their heart is doing, what their pulse is, what their blood pressure is at every single minute of the day, because they have a heart issue. So, for me, it's an inconvenience for them. It may be an issue of life saving. But this old method, kind of a spoiler alert here, this traditional Chinese medicine method has actually led current day wearables developed by Penn State to outperform a lot of the contemporary technology that uses only readings at one or two different spots.

Farbod: Yeah, and a bit more to add on the context side of things about why they're doing this and how the current tech works. So, the modern wearables, you know, you and I both have Apple watches. I think the Garmin probably works in the same way. They're using, and I know I'm gonna get this wrong, what is it? Photoplethysmography or PPG for short, which is really just…

Daniel: I feel like we've gotten tongue-twisted by this same term on the podcast two or three times before.

Farbod: Big idea, right? LEDs something that shines on your skin and then it measures if the light is getting absorbed or reflected and how much right so it's able to detect your veins pumping blood by doing that process. So, that's how the underlying tech works and the measurement it gives is the heart rate and the interval between each beat. So that's what they use to interpret all the other things about the calories you're burning, et cetera, et cetera. All that is great, but one thing that people that have cardiovascular issues probably want to know information about is blood pressure, right?

Daniel: Yeah.

Farbod: And if you've been to a doctor's office in the last year for your checkup, which I haven't, so I need to go soon, they put this thing around your arm puts pressure on you and then you have a doctor that's gauging your heartbeat and then they tell you some reading over like, you know, you got 120 over 60 and that's how they determine your blood pressure if it's good or bad. So, to have a wearable that can accomplish that, you need to kind of drastically change your design and you know, you hinted at it already, there's inspiration from the traditional Chinese medicine side that can kind of help make this happen. It was cool for me to look up how they did it. There's these three points on the, on the wrist, the “Cun, Guan, Chi” and it's supposed to map to three different systems of your body. I don't know if you knew this, but it's supposed to be like your heart, your liver, and your kidney. That's what each of those three fingers are supposed to be on. So yeah, they are trying to figure out how they can reverse engineer the physical way of doing this from 3,000 years ago into a wearable.

Daniel: And it's kind of unique, right? Because in many ways, the way that we're checking pulse today only uses one spot. And in this case, the three wrist spots, the traditional Chinese medicine method, uses three fingers on the same artery, right? Was it the radial artery?

Farbod: Yep.

Daniel: And they're using three fingers on the same artery. And the method is for these three fingers, you adjust the pressure on each of them to try and understand what's going on with the heart. And that's really what the key learnings were, that these two things were, using three sensor spots on the same artery and then also adjusting the pressure levels to try and collect more data. That's exactly what this team from Penn State did is they created a 3D printed sensor array. And they took three pressure sensors that are able to build a 3D map of pulse over time throughout one artery. And that's not enough on its own to be able to measure blood pressure, but they add a layer on top of that with a machine learning algorithm, using this pulse map, this 3D map of how blood is pulsing through this artery over time, they're able to infer the blood pressure, the systolic blood pressure, which is when the heart is beating, the diastolic blood pressure, which is between heartbeats when the heart is resting and then also the average blood pressure. And those are all very important things for people with heart issues to know is both the systolic and the diastolic blood pressure because it's different changes in each of those can indicate things about the health of your heart. If your systolic blood pressure is low, it might mean that your heart is not beating strong enough to push enough blood through. But if your diastolic heart pressure or blood pressure is high, it may mean that you have blockages in your artery. Pretend preventing blood from flowing. So, there's different things that you can learn each type of blood pressure and this 3D printed sensor array of three pressure sensors measuring in line, trying to get a map of how the blood is flowing through this artery over time with different depths to try and understand pressure, builds a 3D map of how blood is flowing through your veins, layer that with machine learning and they're able to accurately predict what your blood pressure values would be.

Farbod: Yeah. So, like the main departure here from your current day wearables is gonna be the type of sensor used. So, it's not, you know, LED light based anymore. It's not a photo sensor, it's a pressure sensor.

Daniel: It's not Photoplethysmography.

Farbod: PPG, yeah. There's an array of them at different depths. So now you have, you know, pressure or, not pressure yet technically, but pulse over space over time data. So, you have this nice 3D set of data instead of just this one static spot at this one static depth level that's giving you data over time. So that gives the researchers more flexibility and more depth of data to play around with when it comes to the machine learning model. I've been killing it with the puns, come on. And what's fun about this is right now, like you said, there's those three values that they're focusing on, the systolic, the diastolic, and the medium or mean partial pressure, AKA MAP. But in the future, they can use this data for other stuff as well. And I think they mentioned in their future work that that's kind of what they want to focus on. So, this light sensor based has been commercialized and we've been able to get a lot of cool information out of it. I think now they're betting that not only is this technology better for folks that really need to monitor their health for like, you know, life or death situations, but for the average Joe, this could also provide a more accurate result of what's going on.

Daniel: And not only does it provide additional data, which is blood pressure, which is what's really interesting. It also is more accurate at measuring pulse. So, this is something that the traditional Chinese method could already do. This 3000-year-old method could more accurately measure the pulse because they're going shallow along the artery. And then the second finger goes in the middle of the artery. And then the third one goes very deep in the artery. This gives a more accurate reading of what the pulse signal actually is. Regardless of if you were having an active day or a sedentary day or you were sweating or your forearm was flexed, etc. A lot of the things that current PPG technology struggles with, people are actually able to do quite well with their fingers. In this case, they just created a digital analogy for having three fingers along the same artery by having three pressure sensors located at different depths along a 3D printed jig that allows them to infer, again, not only pulse information, but then also process that through their machine learning model to accurately get blood pressure. And like you mentioned, they're working on getting other future potential health monitoring information as well.

Farbod: Yeah. And the accuracy, I didn't know this. I don't know if he did, but like, apparently the type of pulse differs greatly from person to person. And even in the same person, the patterns can differ quite a bit during the day. So, this just filters out a lot of that noise and gives you a very direct feedback on how you're doing or if there's a blockage like you were saying earlier. So that's pretty exciting.

Daniel: For me, it's an inconvenience when I'm exercising and what I'm trying to do is make sure that I'm doing zone two cardio and I'm not sure if the heart rate reading that I'm getting is correct or accurate. I'm okay living with that, but for someone who's using a wearable device for life saving, read they need to monitor how their pulse is doing, monitor how their blood pressure is doing. This is a huge step forward and it's awesome. I'm gonna get a little sappy here, but I think it's awesome that we're able still to learn things today and get new breakthroughs today from a kind of like, I think people would tend to be, in the scientific community especially, would tend to be a little bit cynical about like 3000 year old holistic medicine methods from China, but I think we knew and know a lot more than we think we know. And by being creative about aligning different discoveries from different disciplines, and applying them in a way that hopefully makes an impact, right? This is an awesome example of let's take this holistic medicine idea that's over three millennium old and apply it to wearable technology, which is only a couple of decades old and get a massive breakthrough in the way that we're able to measure the health of the heart.

Farbod: It's funny how many technological breakthroughs we've had just to realize that they've been done before. One of the ones that comes to my mind is the, was it the Pantheon? The Roman dome, the first dome that was ever made. It was an achievement in architecture and civil engineering because of the concrete poor. And what's been fascinating about it is that the calcium carbide, I think, calcium something, oxide, they used in the mixture of the concrete made it so that whenever there was a crack, if water flowed through it, that crack would re-solidify. And I think that's a new thing that we've started adding to our modern-day concrete mixes as well, inspired by something from like literally thousands of years ago. So, I guess all that to say-…

Daniel: And this is why even if you're a scientist or an engineer, you need to pay attention to history class too, I guess.

Farbod: Yeah, yeah. Ancestors figured it out. Put some respect on that name.

Daniel: It gives us an excuse to be obsessive about the Roman Empire.

Farbod: Yeah. What's your Roman Empire? That's the question of 2025.

Daniel: Yeah. Well, I'll wrap us up here, with a little recap of this episode. Current day pulse sensors and wearable sensors are not accurate. We have issues with measuring pulse signals accurately. And for people with, you know, using a wearable for activity monitoring, it's like an inconvenience, but for people with heart issues who are using this wearable to save their life, it could be a matter of life and death. So, we're talking about a new method from Penn State that is actually an old method. It's 3000 years old. They've learned from traditional Chinese medicine a way that they were able to use wrist pulse checks, and they've created a new pressure sensor array that's on a 3D printed matrix that layers with machine learning to help accurately understand what's going on with the heart. Map blood pressure, map pulse on your wrist, same way that other wearables do, but in a way that's a lot more accurate and gives doctors and patients a lot more information about it. I think it's super interesting that we're able to learn something today from humans 3,000 years ago and make an impact in a way that hopefully saves a lot of people's lives.

Farbod: Agreed, man. I think that's the episode.

Daniel: Yeah, me too, man.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.