Category: HealthCare

HealthCare News

Biobots made from tissue could one day be implanted in humans

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As reported on Engadget. BY STEVE DENT  It turns out that robots don’t need to be BigDog-sized to be freaky. Scientists at the University of Illinois have created one a mere centimeter (half-inch) in size built on a 3D-printed hydrogel backbone. The “ew” part is what powers it: a strip of skeletal muscle cells triggered by an electric current. Previous biobots built with heart tissue couldn’t be controlled, but muscle cells can be activated with electric pulses and made to “walk” at…

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Health HealthCare

Life-saving vest shocks wearers’ hearts to keep them alive

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As reported on Engadget. BY MARIELLA MOON Apparently, 20 percent of patients who need to wear defibrillators don’t actually keep them on at all times — even if they mean the difference between life and death. So, a group of biomedical engineering students from the John Hopkins University designed a new type of wearable defibrillator, which is unobtrusive and comfortable unlike traditional harness designs. The undergrads’ version takes on the form of a stretchable, waterproof vest fitted with sensors. Also, instead…

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Business Culture HealthCare

This pill could stop 90 percent of HIV cases in the US

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As reported on The Verge. By Arielle Duhaime-Ross But only if it reaches the right people Michael Lucas has been taking Truvada, the HIV prevention pill, for about a year now. And the 42-year-old adult film director and gay porn performer readily admits that the decision wasn’t all that hard to make — especially when compared with the alternative. “It just seemed healthier to run the risk of experiencing side effects than to worry about HIV,”…

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Health HealthCare

This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood

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As reported on Wired. BY CAITLIN ROPER  Mathew Scott; Hair and makeup by Raina Antle Phlebotomy. Even the word sounds archaic—and that’s nothing compared to the slow, expensive, and inefficient reality of drawing blood and having it tested. As a college sophomore, Elizabeth Holmes envisioned a way to reinvent old-fashioned phlebotomy and, in the process, usher in an era of comprehensive superfast diagnosis and preventive medicine. That was a decade ago. Holmes, now 30, dropped out of…

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HealthCare Tech

Researchers develop smartglasses that help surgeons see cancerous cells

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As reported on Engadget. BY MARIELLA MOON If you think cancer removal surgery is but a one-time procedure, you’d be wrong. Doctors don’t always cut out all affected tissues in one go, but a new pair of high-tech eyewear could help make that happen. The device, developed by a Washington University research team led by Samuel Achilefu, can make cancer cells perfectly visible to surgeons as they operate. It’s loaded with custom software that makes cancerous cells glow…

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HealthCare Imagery

What Musicians Can Tell Us About Dyslexia and the Brain

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As reported on Wired. BY GREG MILLER Daniel Paxton/Flickr   Dyslexia is a frustrating disorder that gives otherwise smart people trouble with reading. Nobody knows exactly what causes it, but one popular hypothesis is that the root of the problem is a deficit in the brain’s ability to process sounds, especially during childhood. Kids who have a hard time parsing all those talky sounds that grownups make also struggle to learn the connections between speech sounds and…

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Business Culture Health HealthCare

FDA approves swallowable ‘PillCam’ after almost a decade (video)

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As reported on Engadget. BY TIMOTHY J. SEPPALA It’s been about nine years since we last heard from from Given Imaging, but the FDA has finally granted a version of the firm’s minuscule snapshooter its blessing. Not everyone has an easy time undergoing traditional colonoscopy procedures (due to drug allergies, for example), which is where the outfit’s PillCam Colon comes in. The camera takes a series of high-speed photos along its eight-hour tour through your digestive system, and transmits the snapshots to a device you mount…

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Health HealthCare

Med students develop knife that can detect cancerous tissues within seconds

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As reported on Engadget. By Mariella Moon Here’s one for the medical journals: researchers at London’s Imperial College have created a high-tech scalpel that can differentiate between cancerous and non-cancerous tissue as it cuts. The team calls it the iKnife (intelligent knife), and by analyzing vapors created during electrosurgical dissection in real time, it takes only seconds to distinguish healthy flesh from affected tissue. The device’s inventor, Zoltan Takats, says it has the potential to speed up cancer surgery…

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HealthCare Imagery

Researchers print biometric sensors directly on skin, make wearable health monitors more durable

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As reported on Engadget. By Michael Gorman MC10 might be best known for its wearable electronics aimed at athletes, but the company also makes a medical diagnostic sticker called abiostamp. Its creator (and MC10 co-founder), John Rogers has refined that design so that it’s no longer an elastomer sticker — now he can apply the biostamp’s thin, stretchy electronics directly on human skin, and bond it with commercially available spray-on bandage material. By losing the elastomer backing of the…

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