Lung sounds acquired by stethoscopes are extensively used in diagnosing and differentiating respiratory diseases. Although an extensive know-how has been built to interpret these sounds and identify diseases associated with certain patterns, its effective use is limited to individual experience of practitioners. This user-dependency manifests itself as a factor impeding the digital transformation of this valuable diagnostic tool, which can improve patient outcomes by continuous long-term respiratory monitoring under real-life conditions. Particularly patients suffering from respiratory diseases with progressive nature, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, are expected to benefit from long-term monitoring. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has also shown the lack of respiratory monitoring systems which are ready to deploy in operational conditions while requiring minimal patient education. To address particularly the latter subject, in this article, we present a sound acquisition module which can be integrated into a dedicated garment; thus, minimizing the role of the patient for positioning the stethoscope and applying the appropriate pressure. We have implemented a diaphragm-less acousto-electric transducer by stacking a silicone rubber and a piezoelectric film to capture thoracic sounds with minimum attenuation. Furthermore, we benchmarked our device with an electronic stethoscope widely used in clinical practice to quantify its performance.

Background: Uterine contractility, also known as uterine peristalsis (UP), is a critical determinant of fertility, affecting sperm transport and embryo implantation. Increased uterine peristaltic activity has been associated with reduced pregnancy rates. However, data are heterogeneous and uterine contractility has not been widely translated into clinical practice. Cine-MRI, although limited by cost and heterogeneity in data reporting, has emerged as a promising tool to assess uterine dynamics and increase our knowledge of UP in physiological and pathological conditions. Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to describe patterns of UP in physiological and pathological uterine conditions, including endometriosis and fibroids, using cine-MRI. Methods: A systematic literature search of the Medline, Embase, Cochrane and CENTRAL databases and Google Scholar was conducted up to May 2024, including studies evaluating UP by cine-MRI. Clinical studies evaluating uterine contractility were included, excluding those affected by therapeutic interventions or unrelated pathologies. This meta-analysis pooled data from studies comparing uterine contractility in patients with endometriosis. Results: In the 13 included studies (365 women), uterine contractility varied significantly according to menstrual cycle phases and pathological conditions. This meta-analysis showed that women with endometriosis had higher uterine contractility in the luteal phase (0.74; 95% CI: 0.27–1.21) but not in the periovulatory phase (SMD 0.8; 95% CI: −3.78–5.37). Conclusions: Cine-MRI is a promising diagnostic tool for the analysis of UP. Endometriosis is associated with impaired UP, which may be a cause of the decreased implantation rate and infertility in endometriosis. However, further research is needed to consolidate the effect of UP on implantation and fertility and to develop standardised and cost-effective tools to assess uterine contractility and tailor infertility treatment.

Neurology is focused on a model where patients receive their care through repeated visits to clinics and doctor’s offices. Diagnostic tests often require expensive and specialized equipment that are only available in clinics. However, this current model has significant drawbacks. First, diagnostic tests, such as daytime EEG and sleep studies, occur under artificial conditions in the clinic, which may mask or wrongly emphasize clinically important features. Second, early detection and high-quality management of chronic neurological disorders require repeat measurements to accurately capture the dynamics of the disease process, which is impractical to execute in the clinic for economical and logistical reasons. Third, clinic visits remain inaccessible to many patients due to geographical and economical circumstances. Fourth, global disruptions to daily life, such as the one caused by COVID-19, can seriously harm patients if access to in-person clinical visits for diagnostic and treatment purposes is throttled. Thus, translating diagnostic and treatment procedures to patients’ homes will convey multiple substantial benefits and has the potential to substantially improve clinical outcomes while reducing cost. NeuroTec was founded to accelerate the re-imagining of neurology and to promote the convergence of technological, scientific, medical and societal processes. The goal is to identify and validate new digital biomarkers that can close the last mile in neurology by enabling the translation of personalized diagnostics and therapeutic interventions from the clinic to the patient’s home.

Epilepsy is characterized by the occurrence of epileptic events, ranging from brief bursts of interictal epileptiform brain activity to their most dramatic manifestation as clinically overt bilateral tonic–clonic seizures. Epileptic events are often modulated in a patient-specific way, for example by sleep. But they also reveal temporal patterns not only on ultra- and circadian, but also on multidien scales. Thus, to accurately track the dynamics of epilepsy and to thereby enable and improve personalized diagnostics and therapies, user-friendly systems for long-term out-of-hospital recordings of electrical brain signals are needed. Here, we present two wearable devices, namely ULTEEM and ULTEEMNite, to address this unmet need. We demonstrate how the usability concerns of the patients and the signal quality requirements of the clinicians have been incorporated in the design. Upon testbench verification of the devices, ULTEEM was successfully benchmarked against a reference EEG device in a pilot clinical study. ULTEEMNite was shown to record typical macro- and micro-sleep EEG characteristics in a proof-of-concept study. We conclude by discussing how these devices can be further improved and become particularly useful for a better understanding of the relationships between sleep, epilepsy, and neurodegeneration.

Background: The presence of ectopic endometrial glands within the uterine myometrium in patients with adenomyosis has been associated with adverse fertility outcomes. UP (Uterine Peristalsis), a movement of contractions at the junctional zone of the non-pregnant uterus, can be impacted by an altered architecture of uterine layers. Abnormal contractility patterns could impact both uterotubal sperm transport as well as embryo implantation. Because of this potential influence on clinical symptoms and reproduction in patients with adenomyosis, studies have been analyzing the feasibility of diagnostic techniques in assessing uterine peristalsis. Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to detect an alteration in patterns of UP in patients with adenomyosis. Methods: A systematic literature search of Medline, Embase, Cochrane, CENTRAL databases and Google Scholar was conducted up to June 2025, including studies evaluating UP and adenomyosis. Clinical studies evaluating uterine contractility were included, excluding those potentially affected by therapeutic interventions. The meta-analysis pooled data from studies to compare uterine contractility direction between patients with adenomyosis and control groups. Results: In seven included studies (442 women), uterine contractility varied significantly in association with menstrual cycle phases and pathological conditions. The meta-analysis revealed two statistically significant findings: women with adenomyosis showed significantly reduced uterine contraction frequency (SMD −1.81, 95% CI: −3.04 to −0.58, p = 0.0039) and fewer antegrade contractions (OR 0.35, 95% CI: 0.13–0.96, p = 0.0423) compared to controls. Other contractility patterns showed non-significant trends with substantial heterogeneity. Conclusions: Our findings show a significant difference in uterine contraction patterns in patients with adenomyosis compared to controls, namely a decrease in frequency and an increased number of retrograde uterine contractions in the adenomyosis group. The remarkable heterogeneity of the results highlighted the need for larger study cohorts in the future, especially to address the main diagnostic possibilities and treatments in order to improve reproductive outcomes.