AliveCor’s iPhoneECG case was pretty sweet but, being a case, could only be strapped to an iPhone 4. Doctors content with their 3GS or patients who prefer to hug an iPad to their chest will be elated to hear the company is working on a more hardware-agnostic option for your iOS heart monitoring needs. The business card-sized iCard ECG mounts to the back of your iDevice using velcro and wirelessly feeds data from its electrodes to the AliveECG app. The app automatically records 30 seconds of your heart’s rhythmic pulse before uploading it to AliveCor’s servers for sharing with your doctors. The bad news? They’re still awaiting FDA approval, so you can’t run out and pick one up just yet. But, when it does hit shelves, it looks like you’ll have a choice of red or black — so you can make sure your medical accessories match your scrubs. Check out the video after the break.
Withings users not satisfied with only being able to share their weight with the world can now add blood pressure and heart rate to the mix. This iPhone-connected blood pressure monitor made its first appearance at CES, but you’ll finally be able to order one of your own today. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, the $129 accessory costs three to four times as much as off-the-shelf blood pressure monitors, but integrates well if you’re looking to pair it with your Withings scale for a complete vitals management solution. Results can be sent to health sites like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, or directly to your doctor. Care to see how it works? Join us past the break for a hands-on look at the monitor, including a video comparison with the in-store vitals machine at our neighborhood Kmart.
Update: Withings wrote in to let us know that the blood pressure readings in the video below were likely inflated because we were talking, though we do appreciate the concern you’ve already expressed in the comments.
Microsoft opened up the Kinect Software Developement Kit to coders everywhere Thursday. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)
Microsoft on Thursday released a software development kit for its Kinect gaming system, and hackers are already testing the limits of what the device can do.
After the release of the SDK, Microsoft invited a group of developers to its headquarters in Redmond, Washington to see what kinds of applications they could come up with for the device. Dubbed “Code Camp,” the developers were given 24 hours to create programs that would interact with the Xbox-based motion-sensing device.
Initially released in November of 2010, the Kinect replaces the traditional Xbox controller with the movements of your actual hands, using a camera that translates motion into controlling the videogame you’re playing. The device was a hit for the company; Kinect sales surpassed10 million units in March.
But the Kinect’s release proved to be bigger than just a hands-free videogame controller. The device’s motion controller opens doors to application across all sorts of fields, from major advances in robotics to medical research. Until now, sensors and cameras used for capturing the motion of 3-D objects were either cumbersome and expensive, or cheap and unreliable. At $150, the lightweight, compact Kinect is capable of capturing real-time 3-D motion at the perfect price.
Initial Kinect application ideas ranged from the bland — such as a human-controlled version of Atari’s Pong — to the nerdy — like the augmented-reality program that drops a lightsaber in your left hand.
The coolest by far, however, was the “Quadracopter” hack, which lets you move a four-propeller-powered helicopter through the air with a mere flick of your wrists, seen below:
Coders can access the Kinect’s video, microphone and depth sensors to build on the low-level data streams taken in by the hardware. They can also access some of the more high-level capabilities like noise and echo cancellation, and skeletal tracking makes gesture-navigation in applications possible.
For major platforms, launching a software development kit is a big deal. When launching a new piece of hardware like the Kinect, building a robust ecosystem of applications is important to attract potential buyers. In order for that to happen, hardware companies need to court the developer community, enticing coders to build different programs for the new device. Recently, Apple has seen the most success in this realm, as its iOS platform contains over 500,000 applications available for download in its App Store. Similarly, Android is catching up with over 200,000 in the Android Market.
What’s difficult to imagine, however, is how Microsoft can build its developer base of Kinect coders when there seems to be little financial incentive for them to join. As Make points out, Microsoft’s developer agreement terms essentially state “you can’t start a business, make money, sell services or consulting” using the SDK.
“Under the terms of the license for this SDK Beta, you cannot deploy applications created with the SDK Beta for use in your business operations,” according to the noncommercial-use terms Microsoft makes developers agree to. “Even if no fee is charged or received in connection with such use, such use in a business is still a commercial use and is not permitted under the SDK Beta license.”
This is arguably one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Android, which is being beaten out by iOS in terms of making developers more money.
Still, the impetus for Microsoft’s SDK release began with amateur coders creating homebrewed hacks with the Kinect for the fun of it. If opening up the SDK leads to more of this, Kinect’s platform could grow much larger.
Of course, Microsoft’s SDK release is initially available to Windows 7 developers only.
This artificial heart pumps blood continuously using propeller screws. Photo Texas Heart Institute
55 year old Craig Lewis lived for a month without a heartbeat or a pulse. If you had listened to his chest, you would heard silence. If you had hooked him up to an electrocardiograph, you wouldn’t have heard the familiar beep, beep, beep. You would have seen a flat line.
Lewis heart was replaced with a pair of pulseless pumps. Cobbled together from existing ventricular-assist implants and “a moderate amount of homemade stuff,” by Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute, the artificial heart continuously pumps blood using screw-shaped propellers. Hence, constant blood flow without a beat.
Cohn says that the beat is there only because that’s the way the heart works. When they swapped it out for their contraption, “none of the other organs seem[ed] to care much,” he told NPR.
Unfortunately Lewis died a month later due to his disease, but there is another artificial, pulseless heart in action. Abigail is a calf with one of Cohn and Frazier’s hearts, and she is doing fine.
Cohn sees this heart as the future. He likens artificial pulsing hearts to flying machines with flapping wings — mimicking nature is not always the best solution for a machine.
With its single moving part, Cohn and Frazier’s device certainly seems to make a lot of sense. The only problem might be social. After all, without a pulse or a heartbeat, how do you tell if somebody is alive or dead?
Everything can be hacked — that’s an important detail to keep in mind as we start cramming wireless radios into our bodies attached to medical implants. Researchers have been working on ways to protect devices like pacemakers from ne’er-do-wells looking to cause, not just e-harm, but physical injury or even death. A new system developed jointly by MIT and UMass is much more sophisticated that earlier solutions, can be used with existing implants, and is worn outside the body allowing it to be removed in the event of an emergency. The shield, as it’s called, acts as a sort of medical firewall, protecting implants from unauthorized access — doctors send encrypted instructions to it which are decoded and relayed to device, while it blocks any signals not using the secret key. All that’s left to do is figure out what sort of person would mess with someone’s defibrillator.
Scientists have just created living laser light out of a human cell and some jellyfish protein, but it’s not quite as terrifying as it sounds. Developed by Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun at Massachusetts General Hospital, the new technique revolves around something known as green fluorescent protein (GFP) — a naturally glowing molecule found in jellyfish that can be used to illuminate living material. After genetically engineering a human kidney cell to express this protein, Gather and Yun wedged it between two mirrors in an inch-long cylinder, filled with a GFP solution. Then, they infused the system with blue light, until the cell began to emit its own pulses of bright green laser light. Researchers also noticed that the cell could regenerate any destroyed fluorescent proteins, potentially paving the way for scientists to conduct light-based therapy and medical imaging without an external laser source. Hit the source link for more information, though you’ll need a subscription to Nature Photonics to access the full article.
We always knew that Watson’s powers extended well beyond the realm of TV trivia, and now IBM has provided a little more insight into how its supercomputer could help doctors treat and diagnose their patients. Over the past few months, researchers have been stockpiling Watson’s database with information from journals and encyclopedias, in an attempt to beef up the device’s medical acumen. The idea is to eventually sync this database with a hospital’s electronic health records, allowing doctors to remotely consult Watson via cloud computing and speech-recognition technology. The system still has its kinks to work out, but during a recent demonstration for the AP, IBM’s brainchild accurately diagnosed a fictional patient with Lyme disease using only a list of symptoms. It may be another two years, however, before we see Watson in a white coat, as IBM has yet to set a price for its digitized doc. But if it’s as sharp in the lab as it was on TV, we may end up remembering Watson for a lot more than pwning Ken Jennings. Head past the break for a video from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, which, along with Columbia University, has been directly involved in IBM’s program.
Monitoring sleep patterns usually involves a hydra of sensors that keep track of brain activity, muscle movements and heart rates, but a startup called Nyx Devices has developed a new night shirt that can evaluate the quality of a user’s slumber by analyzing only breathing patterns. The form-fitting Somnus Sleep Shirt is embedded with two sensors that keep track of a person’s overnight breathing and transmit this information to a small data recorder, which slides into the lower corner of the nightie. When a user wakes up, he or she can upload their stats to Nyx’s website, where they can generate more detailed analytics and log their caffeine and alcohol intake to find out how all those martini lunches affect their snoozing. Co-inventor Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, thinks the Somnus could help patients suffering from insomnia, who often have difficulty determining how much shuteye they actually get. It’s worth noting, though, that this exclusively respiratory approach is still considered experimental and Nyx still has to conduct a few at-home tests before bringing the shirt to market next year, hopefully for less than $100. Until then, we’ll just keep tossing and turning in our Spider Man jammies. Stroll past the break for an appropriately soporific video.
Here’s an amazing story to end your week on a high note: a 25-year-old paraplegic is now walking again, thanks to a groundbreaking procedure developed by neuroscientists at the University of Louisville, UCLA and Cal Tech. The Oregon man, Rob Summers, was paralyzed below the chest in 2006, after getting hit by a speeding car. This week, however, doctors announced that Summers can now stand up on his own and remain standing for up to four minutes. With the help of a special harness, he can even take steps on a treadmill and can move his lower extremities for the first time in years. It was all made possible by a spinal implant that emits small pulses of electricity, designed to replicate signals that the brain usually sends to coordinate movement. Prior to receiving the implant in 2009, Summers underwent two years of training on a treadmill, with a harness supporting his weight and researchers moving his legs. This week’s breakthrough comes after 30 years of research, though scientists acknowledge that this brand of epidural stimulation still needs to be tested on a broader sample of subjects before any definitive conclusions can be drawn. Summers, meanwhile, seems understandably elated. “This procedure has completely changed my life,” the former baseball player said. “To be able to pick up my foot and step down again was unbelievable, but beyond all of that my sense of well-being has changed.” We can only imagine.
We could feed you a line about the final frontier or exploring strange new worlds, but we’ll just give it to you straight: the X-Prize Foundation has teamed up with Qualcomm to design the Tricorder X-Prize, a $10 million competition designed to boldly go where no contest has gone before. Sorry, we couldn’t help ourselves. The most recent addition to the ambitious X-Prize stable is aimed at producing a mobile medical device, similar to those used on Star Trek, that can “diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.” Said device would allow regular folks to “quickly and effectively assess health conditions, determine if they need professional help,” and then decide on a plan of action. The Tricorder X-Prize competition is still in the planning stages and should be ready to launch sometime in 2012. Full PR after the break.
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