Flexible ultrasound patches for cardiovascular function and disease monitoring

Cardiovascular diseases, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, often present with subtle early-stage lesions, making it imperative to obtain continuous, quantifiable circulatory physiological information in real-life settings. Flexible ultrasound patches integrate piezoelectric transducer arrays, flexible packaging, and acoustic coupling materials into an ultra-thin platform that adheres to the skin. They enable long-term, noninvasive monitoring of key indicators, such as cardiac structure, hemodynamics, and vascular elasticity. This article systematically reviews the structural composition and working principles of flexible ultrasound patches, as well as their functional capabilities, including blood flow detection and tissue imaging. It further summarizes recent research progress and representative achievements in applications such as the assessment of cardiac structural and functional parameters, continuous monitoring during rest and exercise stress, and use in heart failure, coronary heart disease, cardiomyopathy, and postoperative follow-up. Offering a fresh perspective, we identify a central bottleneck: the inherent trade-off between skin conformability and acoustic performance. Based on this, we propose design principles centered on adaptive compliance, modular system architecture, and on-patch intelligent processing. We then prioritize three future directions: low-cost manufacturing, standardized clinical validation, and integration with telemedicine platforms, to guide the field. Finally, we discuss the core challenges facing their clinical translation, including limited spatial resolution, motion artifacts, long-term wear stability, algorithm development and standardization, and validation against gold-standard measurements. Future directions-including innovations in materials and manufacturing processes, intelligent algorithms and multimodal data fusion, and large-scale clinical validation-are also highlighted to promote industrialization and clinical implementation.