A researcher with the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health is seeking to improve patient monitoring during anesthesia with a new wearable ultrasound device.

Guelay Bilen-Rosas was a featured speaker at this year’s WARF Innovation Day, held yesterday at Monona Terrace in Madison. She’s a physician with more than 20 years of experience under her belt, and oversees the pediatric transplant anesthesia program at UW Health.

When patients are put under anesthesia for operations, they can’t breathe on their own so specialized machines must do it for them. Physicians and anesthesia teams keep track of their breathing with a number of monitors, but Bilen-Rosas says there’s a major problem with that process.

“Currently, standard monitors that are available to us are not respiratory monitors — they measure heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen,” she said. “They’re indirect monitors; they do not measure breathing. They measure that effects that happen to the body after a respiratory event has occurred.”  Read the full story here.