The days of hemodialysis patients spending hours upon hours sitting in a hospital lounge while waiting for their blood to be cleaned could soon be a thing of the past—assuming, of course, that the world’s first wearable artificial kidney passes FDA muster later this year.
Dubbed the Wearable Artificial Kidney (the WAK), this device is the result of more than a decade of development by teams at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, led by Victor Gura. It is, quite simply, a miniaturized dialysis machine small enough to wear on a toolbelt, simple enough to port in with a standard catheter, and light enough to wear all day. It works just like a conventional dialysis machine—dirty blood is sucked out of your body, pressed through a series of molecular filters to sieve out the waste, then pumped back in—and on the same schedule as a conventional dialysis machine—3, 4-hour sessions every week—except instead of weighing 200 pounds and resembling a filing cabinet, the WAK weighs 10 pounds and fits around your waist.
via Gizmodo
