Back in 1995, I joined a small breakfast group with Dr. Peter Pasternack, a top cardiologist at NYU Medical Center and a pioneer in the field of surgical risks for heart patients, and Dr. Govindan Gopinathan, a top neurologist at NYU. I felt privileged to meet with this accomplished group, and we soon embarked on a project – inspired by Gopinathan – looking into how health care in the outpatient setting was changing, and how it was being threatened by insurance and regulation alike. How prescient this project looks now, with the benefit of the retrospectoscope.
Unfortunately, Pasternack died suddenly of a Cardiac Arrest in October 1996, and “Gopi” and I were too grief stricken to carry on. But Gopinathan didn’t give up. He soon used the sudden death of his close friend as an inspiration for his new invention, “The Glove,” which replaces the cumbersome EKG leads. Standard EKG leads may take more than 5 minutes to put on and require the help of a trained technician. How many lives - like Pasternack’s – have been lost while an untrained person fumbles to get these leads on right?
Current emergency personnel use equipment with only a single cardiac lead. This limits their ability to assess and treat patients “in the field.” The full 12 lead EKG which The Glove provides has the advantage of displaying vectors of electrical conduction at many different angles, providing a three dimensional view of the heart. This view is much more likely to pick up an irregular heart rhythm or an injury to the heart muscle itself.
Gopinathan, thinking of how a rapid response might have saved his friend, developed a cheap disposable mitten which even an untrained person can place on the chest in an emergency or non-emergency. The glove is a synthetic product, a polyester film (Mylar) which is both water and heat resistant, does not conduct electricity, and has not been found to cause a skin allergy. Perhaps most importantly, The Glove does not show up on a standard x-ray so it doesn’t have to be removed when a chest x-ray is taken. Electrodes are pre-positioned on the surface of The Glove, so there is nothing else to do but slap it on.
Once it is placed on the chest, The Glove can be attached by cable to a standard EKG machine, or to any computer, where an associated wireless transmission box can beam EKG tracings to anywhere in the world. A computer chip – to be incorporated into The Glove itself – is currently in development. Soon the EKG Glove will be a self-contained device.” In the future, a patient who is suddenly incapacitated like Dr. Pasternack will be able to feel a chest pain or the slightest thump or palpitation, put on The Glove, and beam their EKG to any doctor anywhere.
The Glove has been studied so far at Ben Gurian University Hospital in Tel Aviv in studies for the FDA, in the Cardiac Catheterization Labs of NYU Langone Medical Center, as well as Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where it has been found to be comparable in accuracy to a standard EKG. The Mount Sinai study was presented to the Society of Cardiac Angiography and Interventions earlier this year. The study concluded that “the agreement between standard- and glove-EKG recordings in cardiac patients is high across a range of relevant electrocardiographic parameters.” According to the Mt. Sinai study, The EKG glove “holds promise for the simplified, rapid diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction or other cardiac disturbance.”
The Glove is cheap, around $20, it is also quite versatile and may be used anywhere from a hospital ICU, in a home, and in an airplane or boat without sacrificing quality. It is both portable and disposable, avoiding infections that are associated with reused equipment as well as the fundamental mistakes that occur when electrodes of a standard EKG are connected incorrectly; a mistake which occurs all the time with chest lead placement.
With over 700,000 people dying in the U.S. of heart disease every year, The Glove is a pioneer in the field of remote access to real time health information that is likely to save many thousands of lives. In the future, The Glove or a product like it will give you 24 hour, home TV based coverage on what your heart is doing at any given moment, warning you and your doctors when something is going wrong. IBM, Microsoft, PreventiceTM, and other companies have developed remote EKG programs using smart phone technology, but The Glove has unique features that make it user friendly. Gopinathan says “somewhere Peter Pasternak is smiling.”
SOURCE: Marc Siegel, Forbes.com
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