A technique used to pinpoint the origin of an earthquake could be adapted to warn of an impending injury to dancers, athletes and even racehorses.
Just as earthquakes produce detectable seismic waves at the Earth’s surface, the tiny cracks that appear in stressed bones emit ultrasound. So Ozan Akkus, a biomedical engineer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, has built a wearable device that detects this telltale ultrasound and warns athletes before a series of small cracks turns into a full-blown fracture.
X-rays can capture the hairline fractures that occur when tiny cracks in bones build up due to…
