Hasta La Gadget!

Diabetes is a major cause of disability in the aging Chinese population, and many of them located in rural areas don’t have immediate access to health care. A team of researchers in China have developed a smartphone technology that they believe could help diabetics.

Called the Chinese Aged Diabetic Assistant or CADA, the technology aims to provide assistance to patients and doctors alike. The program can monitor the patient’s blood pressure, weight, diet, exercise routine, mood and blood glucose levels. It is also designed to be interactive so that the patients will learn self-management that’s right for their condition. When the project started, the developers were not aiming for program that’s centered on gaming. But further studies on the target population revealed that gaming “was a persuasive way to engage patients in managing their personal health.” According to ScienceDaily, one of the games in the program is a food pyramid game that’s designed to encourage patients to eat healthy. There’s also a trivia game and a tile-matching game that aims to educate the patients on what’s needed to live a healthy lifestyle.

The program was designed for the smartphone since the researchers found that many of the patients are already in possession of mobile phones and smartphones, making the devices a logic choice for the patients to be interested in the technology. Moreover, smartphones are mobile, giving the developers more options for the technology’s improvement. In the future, developers aim to improve the technology so that patients will be able to send their information to health care providers.

Mercedes-Benz has launched mbrace, an annoyingly non-capitalized but significant revamp of its existing Tele Aid remote assistance system.

Tele Aid was similar to GM’s OnStar service. The new mbrace system now offers stolen vehicle tracking, crash notification, and voice-enabled navigation, as Car and Driver reports. mbrace also offers Mercedes Concierge, which at an extra cost, lets drivers call up an operator to make restaurant reservations, find nearby events, or otherwise act as a glorified personal assistant.

BlackBerry and iPhone owners also see new improvements with mbrace. With an accompanying mobile app, mbrace lets drivers find their car’s location, as well as lock and unlock the doors. The app displays the car’s location on a map, so you can find it in a parking lot or on a forgotten side street.

Mercedes-Benz is including six months of free mbrace service, along with three free months of mbrace PLUS–which includes Mercedes Concierge and is, annoyingly, completely capitalized. After that, mbrace costs $280 per year, while PLUS costs $520 per year.

I had a chance to test out Sony Ericsson’s new Xperia X10 (codenamed “Rachael”) for a few minutes at last night’s Pepcom in NYC.

The Xperia X10 is a slim, sleek slab with an expansive 4-inch capacitive touch screen with 854-by-480-pixel resolution. That’s the same pixel count but slightly larger than the 3.7-inch screen on the Motorola Droid. Unlike its predecessor, the Xperia X1, the X10 drops the keyboard and also switches from Windows Mobile to Android.

Well, that sure didn’t take long. Amazon has discounted the brand-new, mostly-good Palm Pixi webOS smartphone to just $25 with a two-year Sprint contract, only one week after its introduction.

The Pixi is a smaller, sleeker, but less powerful version of the Palm Pre. The Pixi drops the slider mechanism, steps down to a slower CPU architecture, loses Wi-Fi, and has a smaller touch screen with less resolution.

None of that is terrible, necessarily. The big problem all along has been its big brother the Palm Pre, which is a truly excellent smartphone that was already selling for below $100 when the Pixi hit stores last Thursday. (Via Engadget Mobile)

T-Mobile customers in the UK started getting phone call from other carriers when their contracts were nearing an end. How did the third-party companies know? It turns out that someone sold millions of company records to brokers, a charge recently confirmed by T-Mobile itself–though the company denied prior knowledge.

Asked by the BBC to respond, a spokesman for the company called the action “deeply” regrettable,” adding, “When it became apparent that contract renewal information was being passed on to third parties without our knowledge, we alerted the Information Commissioner’s Office.”

The company insists that it is working with that office to identify the source of the leak.