Surgery – Truss – Pad
Patent
1992-06-19
1995-06-27
Pellegrino, Stephen C.
Surgery
Truss
Pad
36441302, A61B 504
Patent
active
054271134
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a biological information measuring system for obtaining information about a living body by measuring and analyzing dynamic electrical characteristics on and in the vicinity of the surface of the living body.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Electrical measurement of the surface of a living body, the skin, for example, is important in the field of electrophysiology, and is being practically applied to a polygraph and various types of diagnostic instruments in acupuncture and moxibustion. It is known that when measuring the electrical characteristics of the skin, the magnitude of voltage being applied and the duration of voltage application have a significant influence on measurement results. Application of too high a voltage could cause the electrolysis of water and/or dielectric breakdown in and out of adjacent cells. Such irreversible phenomena become pronounced when voltage application lasts longer. Application of a voltage of 10 volts for a few seconds can hardly obtain satisfactory reproducibility in the measurement of the d-c resistance of the skin. That is, a d-c measurement by applying a voltage of approximately 10 volts is nothing more than a kind of breakdown test. In order to perform proper measurements in a range where Ohm's law holds, it is necessary to apply a lower voltage for a duration as short as possible.
The surface and the inside, i.e., internal organs, of a human body are strongly linked to each other with the autonomic nervous system. Any disturbance of an internal organ is therefore indicated by a paresthesia at a particular location of the body surface governed by the autonomic nerve belonging to the same vertebral segment. This is a phenomenon known as the viscerosensory reflex, which is frequently used as a diagnostic means. Furthermore, the human body is a total system in which not only individual organs and tissues are combined while maintaining independence with each other, but also autonomic nervous, hormone and other systems have extremely complicated and delicate effects upon each other via unknown interactions. The surface and inside of the body are linked to each other by means of an entire system of such interactions.
Medical electronic engineering has made remarkable progress in recent years to such an extent that modern medical science relies almost entirely on instrumental diagnosis. Most of these diagnostic instruments, however, are dedicated to local diagnosis of the inside of the human body using X rays, ultrasonic waves, etc. Prices of instruments as well as their operating costs are usually extremely high. Furthermore, these instruments often cause abnormal stimuli to the human body, and some of them may leave a certain degree of impairment after diagnosis in extreme cases.
In view of this, the present inventor et al developed and proposed an internal organ-autonomic nervous function diagnostic system for diagnosing the "Keiraku" and the function of an internal organ to which the Keiraku belongs on the basis of parameter values characterizing changes over time in the current obtained by applying a rectangular-wave pulse voltage of 1/1,000 seconds and less than 3 volts to a location, called the "Seiketsu" according to acupuncture/moxibustion medicine, on fingers and toes (Japanese Patent Publication 52-4878; U.S. Pat. No. 3,971,366). In the following, the system according to this proposal will be referred to as the prior-art system.
The phenomenon on which the prior-art system relies was novel and not publicly known. That is, an electric current I (t) corresponding to a rectangular-wave voltage applied to the skin is a transient current which reaches the maximum value immediately after voltage application, and then attenuates within only several tens of microseconds into an almost constant d-c component. FIG. 1 shows the waveform of this transient current. The maximum current flowing in the initial stage is called the pre-polarization current BP, and the eventually stabilized d-c current is called the post-polarizatio
REFERENCES:
patent: 3971366 (1976-07-01), Motoyama
patent: 4016870 (1977-04-01), Lock
patent: 4557271 (1985-12-01), Stoller et al.
patent: 4794934 (1989-01-01), Motoyama et al.
patent: 4817628 (1989-04-01), Zealear et al.
patent: 4940060 (1990-07-01), Gu et al.
patent: 5092344 (1992-03-01), Lee
A. van Boxtel "Skin Resistance during Square-wave Electric Pulses of 1 to 10 mA" Med. & Biol. Eng. & Comput. 1977, 15, 679-687.
Fumio Akasaka
Hiroshi Motoyama
Keisuke Kobayashi
Yoshiko Itagaki
Pellegrino Stephen C.
Tucker Guy V.
LandOfFree
Biological information measuring system does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this patent.
If you have personal experience with Biological information measuring system, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Biological information measuring system will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFUS-PAI-O-281588