Hasta La Gadget!

Wouldn’t it be great if fitness and medical gadgets automatically knew who was wearing them? Researchers from Dartmouth have come up with a new way to provide health monitors just such an ability using a tiny electric current and a bioimpedance sensor. You see, each person’s body provides a different amount of opposition to electrical current, so bioimpedance can be a unique biometric identifier. The researchers’ idea is to create a bracelet that uses bioimpedance readings to recognize its wearer in a secure, unobtrusive manner and communicate that identity to other wearable devices.

Using such a bracelet, “the devices discover each other’s presence, recognize that they are on the same body (and transitively learn from the wrist device whose body), develop shared secrets from which to derive encryption keys, and establish reliable and secure communications.” As opposed to other biometrics or password authentication, bioimpedance readings can be taken passively, which is much more appealing than remembering passcodes or scanning fingerprints and retinas. For now, the researchers have created an eight-electrode proof-of-concept bracelet, but its accuracy leaves something to be desired — it correctly identifies its wearer only 80 to 90 percent of the time, whereas fingerprint recognition has a failure rate of less than 1 in 1,000. So, we’re a ways off from bioimpedance-based security, but research is ongoing, and you can learn all about it at the source below.

Filed under: Wearables, Science

Researchers use bioimpedance as a biometric, let health monitor devices know who you are originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 20:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The US government will begin a superfund-style treatment program to clean up Agent Orange sites in Vietnam today, super-heating soil to 635 degrees Fahrenheit as it helps turn around decades of contamination. The high temperature treatment is part of a $43m joint project between the US and Vietnam, USA Today reports, cleaning a 47-acre site near Denang’s commercial airport from dioxin, a chemical known to cause cancer, birth defects and other disabilities.

Ex-situ thermal treatment is one of several methods to address dioxin contamination, and has been widely deployed across the US in areas where toxic chemicals have been discovered in buried stores. The system sees the contaminated soil placed into sealed, special containers and heated to extremes, breaking down the Agent Orange into a combination of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other harmless substances.

The first site – currently closed to the public – will see workers dig down around 6.56-feet to excavate the affected soil. A second site is being evaluated nearby; in total, around 2.5m cubic feet are expected to be dug up and treated; it’s possible the clean-up could use in-situ thermal treatment, which does not require the same degree of material movement, but does take longer.

Today’s collaboration is the latest step in several years of work between the US and Vietnamese governments, which has seen the US spend around $60m in the country in the past five years. The active clean-up is the first such element of the project, however; previously, US experts helped lay a 6-inch concrete layer on top of the area, to prevent poor weather from creating mud that could carry the dioxin to other areas.

Even if the four-year project is a success, the clean-up will have addressed a comparatively tiny proportion of the overall Agent Orange deployment. In the nine years of dioxin’s use, the US military sprayed the chemical across an estimated 5m acres, using around 20m gallons in the process.

US to use super-heat to help rid Vietnam of Agent Orange is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Here’s something Google’s Glass can’t do: create a virtual tent of cats for those times when you can’t be around your favorite furball. The Cat Immersion Project is the bizarre and brilliant DIY handiwork of the staff at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, projecting photos of more than 3,000 cats into a tented space – complete with purring sound effects – so that 16-year-old cancer patient Maga Barzallo Sockemtickem could get her dose of felines despite being in protective isolation.

Sockemtickem was forced spend more than seven months in hospital in 2011, and then spent a further month more recently in post-transplant recovery. During all that time she was unable to see her own cat, Merry, because of the risk of damage to her immune system.

In response, staff at the Children’s hospital put out a call on Facebook for messages of support and photos of cats, and received a huge number of responses in return. With the help of some sheets, speakers and projectors, the “virtual cat cocoon” was born.

Technically straightforward, then, but with a huge potential to change someone’s day through the awesome power of cats. We’ll be petitioning Google for the inclusion of a virtual cat plugin for Project Glass.

[via Wired]

Cat Immersion Project creates crowdsourced kitty cocoon is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Spray-on medical solutions packed with cells certainly seem to be catching on. A new study published in The Lancet highlights a spray infused with skin cells and blood clotting proteins that helps leg ulcers heal quicker. Normally, the open wounds only undergo a compression bandage treatment and typically heal after six months. Patients who were also spritzed with the cell-imbued solution, however, experienced a rapid decrease in ulcer sizes soon after being treated. Three months into the regimen, 70 percent of those who had the mist applied were healed of the malady. Not only does the new remedy speed up the healing process, but it also avoids the need for a skin graft, another method used to hasten rehabilitation. Cost is a potential concern, but further tests are still needed to determine the therapy’s practicality.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Filed under: Science

Cell-infused ‘spray-on-skin’ helps leg ulcers heal more quickly originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Aug 2012 18:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The FDA has issued approval for an interesting medical gadget that is designed to be swallowed. The digestible sensor is designed to report back to doctors on a patient’s adherence to medications, as well as to share their vital signs. The device is called the Ingestion Event Marker system and uses what appears to be a pill with a sand grain sized transmitter embedded inside.

The product comes from a company called Proteus Digital Health and the information the sensor gathers is collected on an iPhone app. The sensor was approved for use in Europe in 2011. The sensor itself is embedded inside of a pill or other consumable item and gathers power from stomach fluid.

The sensor sends signals to a patch worn on the user’s stomach that then sends information out to a smartphone application. Information the sensor gathers includes heart rate, body position, and activity. Once the data is received by the smartphone application it can also optionally be sent automatically to a physician. The sensor eventually makes its way out of the body and into the toilet.

[via CBS News]