Medtronic Sees a High-Tech Solution to Global Health Woes

By Eliza Strickland
Posted 3 Sep 2014 | 20:00 GMT
If you believe that health care is a human right, as
does Stephen Oesterle

Photo: Medtronic
Medtronic's next-gen pacemaker points the way to tiny
implantable sensors and therapeutic devices.
(http://wwwp.medtronic.com/Newsroom/Biography.do?itemId=1108588987527&lang=en_AU),
Medtronic's VP of medicine and technology, you need to look for global health solutions that scale up. "We
can't build enough hospitals or train enough physicians to take care of all these people," Oesterle says. The
answer, he says, is a distributed model of medicine in which we put sensors in people's bodies and "a
physician in every phone."
Medtronic is known for making pacemakers, brain implants, and other sophisticated medical devices that
cost a pretty penny and are therefore primarily available to patients in the developed world. That's a market
of about 1.5 billion people, Oesterle said in a talk at last week's meeting (http://embc.embs.org/2014/) of
the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Another 1.5 billion people around the world have
access to some rudimentary heath care, and 4 billion others have none. Oesterle is calling on engineers to
design the tech that will bring medical care to these masses.
In a conversation with Spectrum, Oesterle elaborated on
his vision. He says that he drew inspiration from a visit to
a hospital in Chengdu
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu), the capital city
of China's Sichuan province. The hospital (pictured at
right) is the world's largest with 8000 beds, and it's being
enlarged to reach a total of 12,000 beds. And then there
are the outpatients: 4.5 million of them each year.
"People take trains across western China and queue up

all day to get one minute with the doctor," Oesterle says. He thinks it would simply be better medicine to
distribute diagnostic and therapeutic technologies to all these people where they live.
Such a system would be enabled by implanted and wearable sensors that can monitor vital signs and metrics
of chronic ailments like diabetes, heart disease, and asthma. These sensors would send continuous streams
of data to a phone or to the cloud for automatic analysis, and any red flags could trigger alerts for the patient
or an off-site physician. The alert could even trigger an implanted therapeutic device to deliver a dose of
medicine or a jolt of electricity.
While many people think of infectious disease as the biggest heath threat in the developing world, noncommunicable diseases are actually the most frequent causes of death everywhere except Africa, and their
prevalence on that continent is increasing rapidly. The World Health Organization reports
(http://www.who.int/nmh/publications/ncd_report_chapter1.pdf?ua=1) that 80 percent of deaths from
non-communicative diseases occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Medtronic's work on pacemakers points the way toward other implantable therapeutic devices, Oesterle
says. The company's engineers have already built an experimental, next-gen pacemaker that's smaller than
Abraham Lincoln's head on the penny (pictured above). Such an implant "could go anywhere," Oesterle says,
and electrical stimulation could potentially treat a number of conditions (see the slide below). "Everything in
the body is electrically active, and we know we can modulate these systems," he says. "This is something
electrical engineers can solveso get busy."