Thermo Mirror measures body temperature January 17, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Invention, Medicine, Technology.1 comment so far
I wouldn’t buy a mirror for over $1000 only to measure my body temperature from 30 centimeters away, but there must be someone in Japan who will do so because a Japanese electronics firm NEC/Avio just presented at CES 2011 this technology.
All this without sticking a glass mercury stick underneath your tongue! So when you call in sick to work from your cellular phone, you actually have the evidence that you are indeed “under the weather”. In fact, your boss can even hear the confirmation because the Thermo Mirror will sound an alarm if your temperature is above normal.
By the way, when the Thermo Mirror is not displaying your personal body temperature, it is displaying other information such as the date, time, humidity, and weather temperature.
The product probably works with infrared thermography.
Samsung Galaxy Tab in Medicine January 10, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Innovation, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Technology.8 comments
I predicted a massive role of tablets in 2011 and also wrote about the pros and cons of using iPad in healthcare when it became a hit last year. So it’s time to talk about Samsung Galaxy Tab which actually has changed totally my online activities in the past 3-4 weeks.
Pros:
- Flash-based websites don’t mean any problems.
- Multi-tasking works nicely.
- Has a camera (both photo and video), plus videoconferencing is possible.
- Battery life seemed to be over 15 hours.
- Much smaller than iPad, really easy to hold for long time.
- Has barcode scanner app.
- Reading medical papers, e-book and PDFs is comfortable.
- The voice-controlled search app Vlingo is at least as good as Siri on iPhones.
Cons:
- If it’s connected through USB to laptops, battery won’t be charged.
- There are still more and better apps on iPhone, though the newly introduced medical category in the Android Marketplace improves nicely.
- Price is still high (although there will soon be a cheaper only Wi-fi version).
- Other cons are normal tablet problems (no mouse connection, cannot use it in gloves, etc.)
I use the Galaxy Tab instead of PC or laptop in several tasks:
- Fast search (Vlingo)
- Reading e-books and medical papers (Adobe Reader és Amazon Kindle)
- Organizing to-do lists (Task List)
- Radio (TuneIn Radio), music, video, camera
- Twitter, Skype, Facebook clients are really user-friendly on Galaxy Tab.
- Medical databases (Epocrates, Medscape)
- Drug databases (iPharmacy +), medical descriptions (iTriage)
- Document editing (ThinkFree Office)
- Being up-to-date (Speed Anatomy, Fluid & Electrolytes, Google Reader)
What is your experience?
Best ECG Mobile Solution Ever January 7, 2011
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Invention, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile, Technology, Video.1 comment so far
I’ve already written about numerous ECG solutions in smartphones (see below), but a recent Medgadget report beats them all.What you need is an iPhone with the special app, a wireless case and you can perform an ECG. There are so many great ideas which will probably never be used in practice, but this, I believe, will be an exception.
Seattle, Washington based Alivecor will be showing off its new iPhonECG system at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The company has partnered with Oregon Scientific to manufacture the units, which are expected to sell for under $100 a piece.
Related posts:
Augmented Reality For Color Blindness December 20, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Innovation, Medicine, Mobile, Technology.6 comments
Dan Kaminsky, an internet security researcher, had a hobbi project which turned out to be a huge success. He created a 3$ iPhone (+ Android) application which is based on augmented reality and was designed to help people with colour blindness.
There’s actually a lot of color blind people — about 10% of the population. And they aren’t all guys, either — about 20% of the color blind are female (it totally runs in families too, as I discovered during testing). But most color blind people are neither monochromats (seeing everything in black and white) or dichromats (seeing only the difference between orange and blue). No, the vast majority of color blind people are in fact what are known as anomalous trichromats. They still have three photoreceptors, but the ‘green’ receptor is shifted a bit towards red. The effect is subtle: Certain reds might look like they were green, and certain greens might look like they were red.
Thus the question: Was it possible to convert all reds to a one true red, and all greens to a one true green?
The answer: Yes, given an appropriate colorspace.
To describe it even more clearly, here is the Ishihara colour test. If you don’t have this condition, you will spot numbers in the big circles on the left. If you can’t spot those numbers, on the right, you’ll certainly spot them as here are the same pictures but through the application of Dan.
Like this:
TeleBoss September 17, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Technology, Telemedicine, Video.add a comment
My PhD supervisor is now spending 10 months at a US research center and it means we have to work remotely and also organize meetings via Skype and other communication channels. Well, regarding clinics, it might work. The prototype was created and designed by RoboDynamics.
Our robot TiLR is world’s first commercial Telepresence Robot which radically change the way people can work remotely by increasing throughput while simultaneously decreasing costs.
A remote worker would uses the robot as her physical avatar in the remote location. The net effect is that the remote worker performs exactly as she is there in person – which makes robotic telepresence unlike any other collaboration solution in existence today.
Implantable blood sugar sensor August 9, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Invention, Medicine, Technology, Video.4 comments
Engadget just reported a fantastic technology which enables diabetes patients to measure blood sugar levels without finger pricks.
A crew of researchers from The University of Tokyo and BEANS Research Institute are in the process of developing a newfangled blood sugar sensor that “reacts to glucose and lights up inside the body.” ‘Course, injecting dyes into humans in order to receive interpretable signals ain’t exactly new, but hydrogel is what makes this approach unique. As the story goes, this jelly-esque material can be implanted within the body, enabling blood sugar levels to be monitored and measured externally with no pain or irritation whatsoever. In theory, a monitoring system could trigger an alert as soon as the internal levels dipped or rose beyond a predetermined extreme, giving those with diabetes a maximum amount of time to get things back in balance.
Health 2.0 News: Palatometer, Telescopic Eye and Google Voice July 14, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Google, Health, Health 2.0, Innovation, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Technology, Video, Virtuality, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.1 comment so far
- MedLibs Round 2.6: Jacqueline at Laikas MedLibLog just published a new blog carnival entry featuring several Scienceroll posts as well.
- Telescopic eye implant approved by the FDA: It might help elderly people dealing with macular degeneration.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act identified secure patient-physician e-mail messaging as an objective of the meaningful use of electronic health records. In our study of 35,423 people with diabetes, hypertension, or both, the use of secure patient-physician e-mail within a two-month period was associated with a statistically significant improvement in effectiveness of care as measured by the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS). In addition, the use of e-mail was associated with an improvement of 2.0–6.5 percentage points in performance on other HEDIS measures such as glycemic (HbA1c), cholesterol, and blood pressure screening and control.
- Dale Larson’s LeanScale App: an iPhone app that helps monitor and discover trends in body fat.
BodyTrace: Weight control and GSM April 13, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Technology, Video, Web 2.0.3 comments
I’ve recently come across BodyTrace, a nice way to combine a bathroom scale that wirelessly uploads and displays your weight & BMI and an online site where you can track all the changes with visualized solutions. You can read the whole story from the first idea on the blog. An excerpt from the description:
We are using the GSM network to transmit your weight to our Website. We use these measurements to create weight and BMI charts and by combining this information with additional data that we collect (from food tracker for example) we can better evaluate your progress and give you feedback on how to reach your goals.
They also have a collaboration with DailyBurn.
See more examples how web 2.0 or social media can be used in fitness here.
Genome Sequencing Under $10,000 January 17, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Genome, Medicine, science, Technology.3 comments
The estimated cost of the Human Genome Project that aimed to sequence the human genome was around $350 million. The dream line is around $1000, and now here is a new milestone. Illumina HiSeq 2000 costs $650,000, but it can sequence a genome for $10,000 and generates 200 gigabytes per run. Though even if we cross the $1000 line somewhere in the near future, I don’t think we are ready to implement this huge amont of data into medical decision making effectively. Technology moves faster than our understanding of clinical genomics.
Fellow bloggers’ reports:
The race for the $1000 genome is serious. Do you remember the new genome sequencer of Helicos? 1 billion basepairs a day:
Muscle-Computer Interfaces January 6, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Innovation, Invention, Medgadget, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Robotics, Technology, Video.4 comments
Medgadget just featured a video describing how EMG (electromyography) could be used in tools created for people with disabilities. Here is an excerpt from the Microsoft announcement:
Many human-computer interaction technologies are currently mediated by physical transducers such as mice, keyboards, pens, dials, and touch-sensitive surfaces. While these transducers have enabled powerful interaction paradigms and leverage our human expertise in interacting with physical objects, they tether computation to a physical artifact that has to be within reach of the user.
As computing and displays begin to integrate more seamlessly into our environment and are used in situations where the user is not always focused on the computing task, it is important to consider mechanisms for acquiring human input that may not necessarily require direct manipulation of a physical implement. We explore the feasibility of muscle-computer input: an interaction methodology that directly senses and decodes human muscular activity rather than relying on physical device actuation or user actions that are externally visible or audible.
