Hasta La Gadget!

Bioengineering doctoral student Kate Balaconis shines the iPhone reader against her tattooless arm.

Maybe tattoos aren’t just for Harley riders or rebellious teens after all. In a few years, diabetics might get inked up with digital tats that communicate with an iPhone to monitor their blood.

Instead of the dye used for tribal arm bands and Chinese characters, these tattoos will contain nanosensors that read the wearer’s blood levels of sodium, glucose and even alcohol with the help of an iPhone 4 camera.

Dr. Heather Clark, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University, is leading the research on the subdermal sensors. She said she was reminded of the benefits of real-time, wearable health monitoring when she entered a marathon in Vermont: If they become mass-produced and affordable for the consumer market, wireless devices worn on the body could tell you exactly what medication you need whenever you need it.

“I had no idea how much to drink, or when,” said Clark, reflecting on her marathon run. “Or if I should have Gatorade instead.”

Clark’s technology could spell out the eventual demise of the painful finger pricks required for blood tests — assuming users have an iPhone, which Northeastern bioengineering grad student Matt Dubach has customized to read light from the tiny sensors to collect and output data.

Here’s how it works: A 100-nanometer-wide set of sensors go under the skin, like tattoo ink — as for the size, “You can spot it if you’re looking for it,” Clark says. The sensors are encased in an oily agent to ensure the whole contraption stays together.

Within the implant, certain nanoparticles will bind exclusively to specific blood contents, like sodium or glucose. Thanks to an additive that makes the particles charge neutral, the presence of a target triggers an ion release, which manifests as a florescence change. The process is detailed in an article published in the journal Integrative Biology.

Dubach designed the iPhone 4 attachment to use the phone’s camera to read the color shift and translate the results into quantifiable data. A plastic ring surrounding the lens blocks out ambient light while a battery-powered blue LED contrasts with the sensors. The software uses the iPhone camera’s built-in RGB filters to process the light reflected off the sensors.

Why blue? Initial trials with lights that projected other colors were hindered by Apple’s built-in optical filter, but blue light uses the iPhone’s built-in RGB setup to process the data accurately. That blue light, powered by a 9-volt battery attached to the phone, works with the sensors’ red-shifted florescence because red shines well through skin.

As of now, the data collected with the iPhone still requires processing through a secondary machine, but Duboch says using the iPhone to do all the work is not far off, and that an app is likely on the way.

Clark hopes to see the work of an entire clinical analyzer done by nanoparticles interacting with smartphones, which would mean a major step forward for personalized medicine. Diabetics and athletes alike could adapt and measure their own statistics without dependence on big, pricey, exclusive medical equipment.

The testing is still in early stages, and hasn’t been tried on humans yet. Research on mice, who have comparatively thinner skin than humans, has shown promising results.

Readings of blood concentrations show up like this, with different colors indicating different sodium concentrations. Photo Courtesy of Matt Dubach.

When Apple’s next iPhone comes out, the project will benefit, said Dubach, citing rumors that the iPhone 5 will include a more powerful camera sensor.

“I’m holding out for the iPhone 5,” Dubach said. “More megapixels gives you more for the average,” meaning the higher-resolution camera provides more data for analysis. Even bioengineers are waiting for Steve Jobs’ next move.

The technology is still years off, but Clark and Dubach’s developments are bringing medicine closer to a time when diagnostics are minimally invasive. Real-time feedback through subdermal circuits and smartphone cameras means you could know exactly when to slug that water.

Researchers tested the iPhone attachment on this plate reader, which determines the nanosensors' response to the reader. Photo courtesy of Matt Dubach

Concerned that a decade and a half of regular cellphone will have a long-term effect on your health? Hopefully the latest study conducted by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) will put your mind at ease. The examination followed nearly 3 million Danish adults, studying links between phone use and the formation of acoustic neuromas — non-cancerous, slow-growing brain tumors that form on the main nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain. The study concluded that people who’ve used a handset for 11-15 years weren’t any more likely to develop a tumor than those who don’t use cellphones at all, though scientists are unsure that this is a long enough period of time to determine a significant correlation (or lack thereof). Still, this comes as refreshing news two months after the WHO released a study revealing that RF waves coming from phones are “potentially carcinogenic,” due to a limited link to glioma and acoustic neuroma. Of course, none of these reports can actually conclude that cellphones cause cancer — only that the two may be correlated. So, what does this latest study really do? It legitimizes the need to conduct more studies.

Cellphones are dangerous / not dangerous: Danish chatterbox edition originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CATRA is an invention of MIT’s Media Lab which uses a cellphone and a cheap plastic eyepiece to detect cataracts. Not only is it cheaper and easier to use than existing solutions, it actually provides much better results.

Cataracts cause blindness by fogging the lens of the eye, scattering light before it reaches the retina. Normally, they are diagnosed using a “backscatter” device which shines light into the eye and measures how much of it is reflected by the cataract. This requires a skilled user, a fancy machine and still doesn’t detect the problem early, nor tell the operator what the patient actually sees.

CATRA uses a smartphone with a custom app, and a cheap eyepiece. The patient holds it up to their eye and the app fires light successively at each part of the eye. The patient uses “the phone’s arrow keys” to adjust the brightness of these beams until they match. The app logs the differences in intensity required to reach the retina and creates a map of the eye. Thus is can detect the problem early, and also reflects the actual experience of the patient.

But most important, it requires no special hardware except for that simple eyepiece.

The product is about to undergo field testing for a future launch. The market for this is clearly the developing world, which is also the place where cellphone usage is taking off. It might be time to forget about programs like One Laptop Per Child and instead concentrate on the using smart-phones instead.

CATRA: Cataract Maps with Snap-on Eyepiece for Mobile Phones [MIT Media Lab via Cult of Mac]

See Also:

• Cellphones Affect Medical Equipment Says Study
• Android App Tracks, Helps Wandering Alzheimer's Sufferers
• MIT Exoskeleton: A Partial Success

Continue reading Hanako 2 robot acts like a human dental patient, makes us say ‘aah’ (video)

Hanako 2 robot acts like a human dental patient, makes us say ‘aah’ (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Controlling a cursor with your brain? Yawn. Restoring movement to paralyzed mice? Color us unimpressed. Help a wheelchair-bound man walk again using only his thoughts? Now we’re talking. That’s the goal of researchers at the University of Michigan who have developed BioBolt, a (comparatively) noninvasive implant that rests on top of the cortex rather than penetrate it. The device is inserted through an easily-covered, dime-sized hole in the skull and feeds patterns from firing neurons to a computer using your epidermis (which is showing, by the way) as a conductor. The ultimate goal of helping the paralyzed walk again is still years away but, in the meantime, it could be used to suppress seizures or diagnose diseases like Parkinson’s. Everyday this mind over matter thing sounds a little less like a load of bullpuckey.

BioBolt brain implant could help the paralyzed walk again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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