A new mobile app will soon put the ability to monitor a baby’s prenatal heartbeat in the hands of pregnant women who may worry about their baby’s health in between doctor’s visits.
A new mobile app will soon put the ability to monitor a baby’s prenatal heartbeat in the hands of pregnant women who may worry about their baby’s health in between doctor’s visits.
As a hardware and software professional, this headline sounds like 100% bullshit.
That is not the same thing as an ultrasound scanner.
It’s a microphone app which trims to, and amplifies, specific frequencies which allows you to monitor the baby’s pulse.
You absolutely can use your phone with an ultrasound scanner, but this requires external hardware which, while not restricted, is not super cheap.
This is probably going to end up like that feature on some smartphones that replaces your picture of the moon with a preset image of the moon.
I don’t see this going well. Also, even if it did, is it a good idea to blast a fetus with Ultrasound over and over and over?
🤷
Absolutely bullshit in a headline, but also potential mamas will probably use this often. The value in hearing your baby’s heartbeat is probably a huge reassurance to many.
Having said that, as a hardware professional, when could we see a consumer accessible mobile ultrasound? I don’t have a spare $2-5k for what they use in ambulances, but I am hoping something low res low quality is accessible in a few years. (Having just read about the open source phased array, I have new hope for many things).
Unfortunately it’s not a matter of capability, but certification. Your watch probably has more processing and imaging power than the best medical systems available in the late 90s, but if you’re planning to market it as anything with even a whiff of medical application, even from the home, then it will need ISO 13485 certification in order to obtain required insurance that costs enough to prevent medical market entry for most businesses, especially when you combine that with the concept of unborn babies.
I mean, according to the rule of phamaceutics, the equivalent costs fo a non-medical ultrasound would be about 10-fold cheaper. So if you don’t care about eventual side effects, you could have an absolute bargain