Web-Enabled Bathroom Scale Could Monitor Heart Failure from Home

Mozziyar Etemadi, MS

Can a retrofitted bathroom scale costing less than $100 save lives and improve the health of millions of Americans living with heart failure while cutting billions of dollars in annual health care spending?

A team led by Mozziyar Etemadi, MS, has been awarded $110,000 to find out. Etemadi is an MD/PhD student in the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program through which he is pursuing a PhD in the UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering and working in the lab of School of Pharmacy faculty member Shuvo Roy, PhD.

The project is one of three national winners, taking second place in the 2012 Prize for Primary Healthcare awarded by the Boston-based Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) and funded by the Gelfand Family Charitable Trust.

Etemadi’s project — “Cloud-Enabled Technology for Monitoring Heart Failure at Home” — seeks to inexpensively tackle a rapidly growing medical problem: Six million Americans living with heart failure and suffering unpredictable health crises.

That solution starts with an everyday phenomenon, says Etemadi. If you stand on an older-style bathroom scale, the kind with a needle that indicates your weight, you will see the needle wiggle slightly with each of your heartbeats.

Read full story on the UCSF School of Pharmacy website.

Photo by Elisabeth Fall/fallfoto.com