For a patient with a chronic health condition, it's impossible to know if something's wrong until a symptom crops up.
But doctors are working on a technology that one day will continuously monitor a patient's health from the inside.
Aisha O'Mally loves her walks, but a few years ago, her heart was failing.
"I remember being just tired. Tired. I couldn't go up the stairs, I was coughing a lot. I couldn't sleep lying down," she recalled.
Aisha's heart deteriorated to the point she needed a heart transplant.
"There's so many things that are going on in your body that you're not aware of, and sometimes the doctors aren't aware of until blood work or until you're feeling completely sick."
Detecting these changes before symptoms is the goal of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center. They're developing an implantable sensor that reads internal chemistry.
"Those things that we're looking at are hormones and proteins that get released into the blood stream and into the tissues when the heart's under stress, when the body wants to make a change," Dr. Spencer Rosero, a researcher, said.
A so-called "living chip" containing a patient's cells will be placed in a device ...   more »