Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like those brain pacemaker researchers are a bit late on this one, as folks at Medtronic are apt to get the jump on advanced OCD treatment given a recent FDA approval of their device. Hailed as the first implantable device “designed to deliver electrical therapy to the brain to suppress symptoms associated with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder,” the Reclaim DBS (deep brain stimulation) Therapy was said to be able to treat OCD patients in cases where drugs and psychotherapy failed. Understandably, Medtronic is doing everything it can to get the product out by the middle of this year, and following up on its good fortune, it also proclaimed that it had started up a randomized clinical trial of DBS for treatment-resistant depression. There’s no mention of an expected price, but apparently only 4,000 or so will be needed each year.

[Via Vos Iz Neias, thanks yossi]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Medtronic’s implantable OCD treatment okayed by FDA originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Feb 2009 02:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It sounds more like something you’d see in X-Men than on an actual operating table in real life, but a team at Massachusetts General Hospital has developed a way to heal surgical incisions with laser light. Christened laser-bonded healing, the methodology has been studied for years, but up until now, scientists have found it impossible to find the perfect balance of heat required to coax tissue into healing itself back together. Irene Kochevar described the process as “nano suturing,” as diminutive collagen fibers are woven together in a way that the old-fashioned needle-and-thread method simply can’t match. The benefits, as you can likely imagine, are numerous: less scarring, faster recovery, the potential for fewer infections and bragging rights that you were struck with lasers and survived. Still, the procedure is far from becoming commonplace in ORs, given that the dermatological procedure hasn’t even been submitted to the FDA yet. ‘Til then, it’s up to you and Wolverine to figure things out.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Laser-bonded healing could replace needle and thread originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Surgical procedures could soon be aided by tiny, rotating robots, according to BBC News. The report said that while the miniaturization of motors hasn’t kept up with other electronics like LCD displays and memory chips, new research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has detailed a motor about twice the size of a human hair.

Up until now, there has been no way to power such a small device, meaning that it couldn’t get around inside the human body. “Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size; as they approach millimeter dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings,” the report said.

With the rise of so-called piezoelectric materials—crystals that expand and contract when a voltage is applied—tiny linear motors became easier to manufacture, according to the report. Now research indicates that these tiny motors could be “coupled to a structure with a helix-shaped cut in it,” allowing the motors to rotate when pushed at one end—similar to how the tail-like flagella on bacteria work. Next stop: testing the new motors in fluids, as opposed to inside a pristine lab environment. Cool stuff, as long as you don’t think about it too hard; then it gets gross. (Check out the short, non-gross video for an animation of how they work.)

It’s pretty clear by watching the demonstration video (which is lurking in the read link, just so you know) that this stuff is still pretty preliminary, but we could definitely see it going places with the right people behind it. The Interface Database Concept was dreamed up by Alan Sien Wei Hshieh, and by utilizing a relatively simple set of Javascripts, he was able to overcome traditional platform incompatibilities that can so often hamstring medical hardware / software in day-to-day usage. The creation aims to enable “seamless and intuitive data transfer” and to “define a set of gesture and multitouch commands that will override controls and input devices that may be difficult to use on medical devices.” The aforementioned vid shows off gesture-based transfers and even an accelerometer-based cross-platform transfer, both of which make you forget that we’re just talking about X-rays and blood tests.

[Thanks, Kara]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Conceptual interface brings gesture-based data transfers to medical realm originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re not exactly sure how we feel about an external lung (okay, we’re completely grossed out, but we’re a bunch of pansies when it comes to this stuff anyway), but a Welsh company is looking to introduce one such device in order to aid those with breathing problems. Haemair’s Respiratory Aid and Prosthetic Lung would theoretically be worn around the belt and incorporated with a “complete prosthetic lung that will employ no electrical or mechanical parts.” By being external, it enables it to be easily maintained, and the simple reversibility is important for “treating emergency and acute cases for which the device might be needed for no more than hours or weeks.” As of now, the company is still developing the final product, but just as soon as it can establish that maintenance-free operation is feasible over the long-term, consider the game decidedly “on.”

[Via medGadget]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Haemair envisions external prosthetic lung and respiratory aid originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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