A new sensor measures how much oxygen is in your body!
If you’ve been to the hospital or even for a checkup with your doctor, you’ve probably had your blood oxygen level tested. This is typically done with a little device that clips on the end of your finger and tells you how much oxygen is in your blood. For some patients with peripheral artery disease, the oxygen in the blood fails to reach the tissues in the body adequately, and this can be especially a problem with limbs like arms and legs. It’s difficult to identify how much oxygen is actually in the tissue, which is separate from the amount of oxygen in the blood. Well, a device made by a company named Profusa is an injectable passive sensor that gets injected into your skin and it can actually read the amount of oxygen in the tissue there. It’s read with an external sensor, no batteries involved, no recharging. This new kind of sensor could change the way that we identify levels of chemicals in our body and help doctors with diagnosis and treatment of disease.