Wearable ultrasound patches: how close are sticky body scanners?

This article is general information, not medical advice.

Wearable ultrasound patches are thin patches that stick to the skin and send sound waves into the body. The echoes that bounce back are turned into images or signals about blood flow and tissue movement. Ultrasound is a routine way to look at the heart, blood vessels and unborn babies. The catch is that a standard scan needs a bulky machine and a trained person holding a probe, so it happens at set times. A patch that could keep working for hours might show changes as they happen, during exercise, in hospital or at home.

This is an early-stage field. The studies below are research studies, and, as far as the pages we checked show, none of the devices described is an approved product that you can buy or use for diagnosis.

What has been demonstrated

The strongest evidence comes from peer-reviewed papers. Results apply to the conditions each study tested, mostly short sessions in small groups. Where the sources give them, group sizes are stated.

• 2021, deep blood flow. A Nature Biomedical Engineering paper reported a prototype stretchable phased-array patch for monitoring blood flow signals from tissue up to 14 cm beneath the skin. In healthy volunteers, the authors used it to record signals from the heart, blood flow waveforms in central vessels and an estimate of blood supply to the brain. The abstract does not state how many volunteers took part.
• 2022, stick-on imaging for 48 hours. A Science paper reported a bioadhesive ultrasound device: a thin, rigid probe held on the skin by a soft hydrogel and elastomer layer. The abstract reports 48 hours of continuous imaging of organs including blood vessels, muscle, heart, stomach and gut, diaphragm and lung. The MIT release says the stickers measure about 2 square centimetres across and 3 mm thick, were tested on healthy volunteers who wore them on the neck, chest, abdomen and arms, and must be connected to instruments that turn the echoes into images. Neither gives the number of volunteers.
• 2023, wearable heart imager. A Nature paper described a wearable ultrasound device for continuous, real-time imaging of heart function, with a deep learning model that estimates the volume of the left ventricle and derives stroke volume, cardiac output and ejection fraction. In the full text, the authors compare it with a commercial ultrasound imager: across twelve cardiac cycles, the two gave no marked difference in these measures. They also report no skin irritation or allergy after 24 hours of continuous wear. The UC San Diego release says the patch can be worn for up to 24 hours and "works even during strenuous exercise".
• 2023, tissue stiffness. A Nature Biomedical Engineering paper reported stretchable arrays that map tissue stiffness, a method called elastography, to depths of up to 4 cm at a spatial resolution of 0.5 mm, checked against magnetic resonance elastography. The authors mapped tissue samples outside the body, detected small muscle damage in volunteers before soreness began, and tracked muscle injuries recovering during physiotherapy. The abstract gives no participant count.
• 2024, brain blood flow. A Nature paper on a conformal patch for 3D imaging and continuous monitoring of blood flow in the brain compared it with a conventional transcranial Doppler probe in 36 participants. Mean differences in blood flow speed between the two were small, between about 0.5 and 1.5 cm/s depending on the measure. The patch gave a usable measurement 70.6% of the time, against 75.3% for the conventional probe. The UC San Diego release describes the participants as healthy volunteers and says the patch is connected by cables to a power source and a computer.
• 2026, pregnancy monitoring. A Nature Biotechnology paper, published on 26 May 2026, reports a patch for continuous fetal monitoring. Its abstract reports good agreement with a handheld clinical ultrasound device in 62 pregnancies, and continuous monitoring data from 52 pregnant women, including healthy pregnancies and pregnancies with small or large babies for their age, gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia and high blood pressure. The UC San Diego release says the study ran at UC San Diego Health and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. We read the abstract and the release, not the full paper.

What is only reported

Some claims come from press releases or company plans rather than from measured results in the papers.

• A single pregnancy case. The 2026 release says that in one case the patch detected prolonged abnormal fetal signals that prompted an early Caesarean delivery, which the researchers say may have helped save the baby's life. That is one case described by the team, not a systematic result.
• Accuracy wording. The cardiac release says the device gives "accurate and continuous waveforms", and the brain and pregnancy releases say the patch's readings "closely matched" conventional probes. These are summaries; the figures behind them are in the papers, where they exist.
• Commercial plans. Softsonics, a company co-founded by Sheng Xu and Shu Xiang, plans to commercialise the cardiac patch, according to the 2023 release. We found no product launch or sale in the pages we checked.

Limits and open problems

• Accuracy against clinical practice. The cardiac comparison covers twelve cardiac cycles against one commercial imager, not a clinical trial against standard echocardiography in patients. The deep learning model only works on people in its training data so far, the authors say.
• Power and wires. The heart, brain and MIT designs are cable-connected or need external instruments. The 2023 cardiac release says a wireless circuit will be covered in a future publication, and the 2026 paper says a miniaturised circuit could enable fully wireless operation.
• Skin contact and movement. The patch has to stay in place and keep good sound contact through sweat, stretching and movement. The longest wear times reported are 24 and 48 hours, and we found no long-term skin safety or comfort trials.
• Small groups. The groups are small: 36 healthy volunteers in the 2024 brain study and 62 pregnancies in the 2026 study. The brain team describes testing in patients with neurological conditions as a next step.
• Interpretation. The MIT release describes AI algorithms that would analyse the images on demand in future, but gives no accuracy figures for them.
• Regulation. None of the pages we checked mentions FDA clearance, a UKCA or CE mark, or any other regulatory approval for these devices.
• Health data. A device that records the heart, brain or a pregnancy continuously would produce sensitive health data. None of the pages we checked say how that data would be stored, shared or protected. Any future product would need clear answers on this.

Possible future uses

Some ideas have not been tested in any source we checked. They include routine heart checks in primary care, and watching blood flow to the brain overnight in people at risk of stroke, which a co-author raises in the 2024 release. These are extrapolations from the research above, not findings.

What to watch next

• A wireless patch tested in people and reported in a peer-reviewed paper.
• A study in patients, which UC San Diego says it plans to run for the brain patch.
• Any regulatory clearance, checked against the regulator's own database.
• Accuracy figures for the cardiac imager from a larger comparison with clinical echocardiography.
• Wear studies longer than 48 hours that report skin safety and comfort.