Detecting Tiny Tremors
Development
The original research came out of Auckland University Medical School’s Liggins Institute where ways to map brain development in premature infants were being studied.
Neonatal seizures are relatively common in sick infants, but up to 85 percent are “silent” or not apparent to the eye. Brain monitoring is the only accurate means of detecting irregularities in the cerebral function of babies.
A monitor can help a doctor detect a condition such as hypoxia, which results from a baby not getting enough oxygen during birth. The EEG results would be used along with other clinical methods to decide whether a baby needed intervention.
At the Liggins Institute, electrical engineers developed their own monitor to isolate the minute brainwaves as EEG signals, measured in microvolts. The core of the device was based on something that has been around in analogue electronics since the 1970s – the cerebral function monitor.
When the engineers realised what they’d achieved they began to consider other possible uses for the technology. And the university began looking for a third party to help commercialise the invention.
Tru-Test was approached to supply the electronics, and eventually bought the intellectual property, with its subsidiary company BrainZ Instruments assembling the parts, cutting the code and taking the final product to market.
Mr MacDonald joined Tru-Test in 1992 as a project manager for electronic milk meters, and has been responsible for the BRM2 product development by subsidiary BrainZ Instruments since 2001.
Compared with the device BrainZ Instruments is marketing, older monitors seem archaic. A baby suspected of having anomalies would be in an intensive care unit with nurses keeping watch continually. The monitor might be available for only 45 minutes of the day because it was so cumbersome to move around and because it was in high demand. The output would be printed on a chart recorder. “You couldn’t manipulate the data, once you got the chart that was it,” says Mr MacDonald.
