Stroke Signals
It’s the year 2018, and amazing, Seattle-born medical technologies are about to save your life.
by Stefan Durham
7:00
Wake Up to the Future
“Ouch!” You scream, jolted out of bed by a hammering pain in your skull. Maybe it’s the unpredictable August weather (a snowstorm last week froze up the light rail system just a month after it opened) or the dizzying altitude of your latest condo upgrade—an 80th-floor flat in trendy SeaTac—but for most of 2018, you’ve felt like a headache magnet. You dress and head out the door, never dreaming that within hours, your life will be on the line.
8:00
A Busy Commute
Pedaling toward your office in downtown Delridge along Mayor Dave Matthews’s new bicycle superhighway, you use your voice-controlled, earbud smartphone to log on to Healthvault—a global online medical network developed at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ—and check your latest blood test results. Ten years ago you could only store and organize your health records and personal device data (from portable dialysis machines or heart monitors, for example) on the system, but now that it’s connected to your doctor’s computer and your credit card company, the program draws from a continually updated database of your diet habits, personal medical info, and family health history. In seconds, the system reports that your lab work has indicated signs of atherosclerosis—inflamed
artery walls—and elevated levels of artery-
clogging cholesterols.
8:30
Predisposition Noted
Alarmed by the news, you dictate a phone message to your doctor detailing recent dizzy spells, the off-and-on weakness in your left leg, and those head-splitting pains. Healthvault automatically transcribes your voice memo and sends it in a text email using Microsoft’s tried-and-true Unified Communications software (which first broke down the barriers between phones and computers back in 2007) and then scans your medical background for related keywords. Discovering that your grandfather suffered a minor stroke when he was around your age, the network sends a priority email to your doctor urging her to examine your migraines ASAP.
9:00
Bad News, Good News
After reading your email, your doc sends a reply saying she’d like to start monitoring your headaches and do a scan for blockages in your cranial arteries. By the time the office security robot grants you access to your building, your doctor has ordered courier delivery of a new PhysioSonics portable ultrasonic head lab, in development by University of Washington doctors since 2000.
9:30
Life-Saving Head Gear
You sign off on the delivery, slip on the baseball-cap-shaped head lab, and pour yourself a cup of Starbucks green-tea-fortified soy smoothie from the office dispenser. Before you’ve begun sipping your drink, the head lab starts using an array of ultrasound emitters and sensors to determine how much blood is flowing through your brain’s arteries, and to detect any hazardous free-floating bits—like blood clots—that could mean your headaches are due to more than President Schwarzenegger’s vexing domestic policies.
1:00
Automatic Ambulance
After lunch you notice some distortion at the edges of your vision—not good. The head lab picks up something else: A small clot in a main artery on the right side of your brain is cutting off blood flow. It wirelessly transmits the information to your hospital’s internal Amalga system, where staffers can make patients’ MRI results, blood work data, and other medical info instantly available to emergency response teams or special care clinics that may need it. Amalga was first created by a team at the Washington Hospital Center in 1996, later developed by Micro-soft for use on hospital intranets in 2006, and recently connected with the Healthvault network to create an always-alert online health system, which automatically notifies your doctor and contacts a local emergency response network before you know you need it. Just as you’re starting to feel a tingling sensation in your left hand, the Amalga-Healthvault central computer summons an ambulance from the closest hospital to your office building.
1:15
Instant Message
A message instantly sent to your phone and email address warns that you’re suffering a mild stroke and notifies you that medics are on their way to treat you. You alert coworkers that there is an emergency; they help you out of the office building and meet the ambulance at the exact moment it pulls up to the entrance. (“Excuse me, sir, are you the one having the stroke?”)
1:20
Rapid Response
As soon as you are inside the vehicle, a full-fledged blockage, a thromboembolism, triggers a serious attack. With the right side of your face going numb and your arm limp at your side, the medics flip on a TeleStroke monitor that wirelessly connects them to a 24-hour on-call team of stroke specialists at Swedish Medical Center, Seattle’s top cardiovascular clinic—six miles away in Cherry Hill.
1:22
Dial-Up Diagnosis
The doctors at Swedish remotely diagnose your stroke and direct the medics to give you an IV mix of tissue plasminogen activator to stop the clotting.
1:25
Miracle Meds
By the time the ambulance arrives at the intensive care unit, the drugs have taken effect. Your doctors decide to fortify your IV cocktail with an infusion of Neu2000KL, a drug first developed—and tested—by Sammamish-based Amkor Pharmaceuticals in 2008. The neuroprotectant reduces damage to brain tissue caused by stroke and encourages the repair of affected brain cell structures.
1:45
Under control
Family members show up and you chat with them. Thanks to the rapid treatment, the stroke seems to have caused minimal damage, though lingering weakness in your left arm and leg means that you’ll have to undergo rehabilitative therapy.
Day 2
On the mend
You sit down to the first sessions of your robot-guided regimen of arm and leg rehabilitation exercises at UW’s Harborview Stroke Center. Next week, you’ll return to work, though you’ll need to wear that head lab for the next few months—try to ignore your snickering colleagues.
Published: August 2008
