Health tech

Turning to robots for speech and physical therapy may not be everyone's idea of high-quality, personalized health care. But for stroke patients -- particularly those in rural, isolated areas -- therapists can be difficult and expensive to come by, and rehabilitation can be elusive.

So a speech language pathologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is studying the interactions of stroke patients with the uBot-5, a child-size humanoid robot with arms and a computer screen through which therapists can interact with people. And for at least one stroke patient, the bot appears to be doing a stand-up job.… Read more

If researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have their way, their new heart disease study won't suffer from a small sample size. Using online and mobile phone tools, they hope to get 1 million people from around the world to participate.

Launched this week, their Health eHeart Study (yes, very cute) enables participants to use their smartphones to frequently monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and pulse rate, and submit the resulting data via a secure online portal. The researchers, in turn, will use fancy algorithms to crunch that massive volume of data.

The goal? To use the super sample size to better understand -- and thus predict and prevent -- heart disease.… Read more

Want an instant pulse check? Look into the lens.

Fujitsu today announced a technology that can take a person's pulse in real time using the built-in camera on a smartphone, tablet, or PC.

The system reads pulses by measuring variations in the brightness of the face thought to be caused by blood flow. It requires no special hardware and can measure pulse rate in as little as 5 seconds, positioning it as a possible tool for easy self-monitoring, anytime and anywhere, without the need for a special device. It could also be used by security teams to detect people acting suspiciously in public venues such as concerts and airports, Fujitsu says. … Read more

Our body tissue, not to mention diseases, each have their own unique "fingerprint," which can in turn be examined to diagnose various health issues at very early stages.

Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland say that after a decade of work they've developed a new MRI (magnetic resonance imagining) technique that can scan for those diseases very quickly. In just 12 seconds, for instance, it may be possible to differentiate white from gray matter in cerebrospinal fluid in the brain; in a matter of minutes, a full-body scan would provide far more data, making diagnostics considerably easier and less expensive than today's scans.… Read more

Shortly before midnight on a recent business trip to Detroit, a 40-year-old man sent his wife the following text messages over the course of two minutes:

"Oh baby your"

"I am happy."

"I am out of it, just woke up, can't make sense, I can't even type, call if ur awake, love you."

Concerned, his wife had him go to a hospital the next morning, where a routine bed test -- including assessment of fluency of speech, reading, writing, and comprehension -- indicated he was fine. The doctors did note a very slight slackness on one side of his face. Then they handed him a smartphone and asked him to type, "The doctor needs a new BlackBerry."

He texted, "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb," looked it over, and concluded that his message contained no errors. (He was also, it seems, unable to crack any BlackBerry jokes.)… Read more

An electrical engineer at Stanford has led the effort to develop an endoscope that is not only as thin as a human hair but also boasts a resolution four times better than existing ultrathin models. The "micro-endoscope" could lead to far less invasive bio-imaging, making it easier and safer to peer inside living organs and tissue to, say, study the brain and detect cancer.

The researchers, led by Joseph Kahn at the Stanford School of Engineering, report in the journal Optics Express and the Optical Society of America's Spotlight in Optics that the prototype can resolve objects … Read more

Doctors have already replaced a patient's jaw with a 3D-printed titanium implant, so why not part of a skull? Earlier this week, 75 percent of an American patient's skull was surgically replaced with a custom-made implant produced by a 3D printer from Oxford Performance Materials.

The full name of the implant is the OsteoFab Patient Specific Cranial Device. The implant is made from PEKK biomedical polymer and printed using CAD files developed to fit each person. The world of skulls is not one-size-fits-all. Much like an expensive pair of bespoke shoes, these skull implants are unique to the individual.… Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

In journalism, there's a phrase you'll often hear that refers to the paragraph toward the beginning of a story that sums it all up in a nutshell. We call it the "nut graph," and as you're about to read, it's a term that's never been more appropriate than in the case of Joshua Shoemake's current project on Kickstarter.

Shoemake is looking to crowdfund $20,000 for the first production run of Snowballs, a specially designed pair of men's underwear loaded with ice packs that cool down the scrotum and testes in hopes of increasing sperm count and mobility (and ergo, fertility)… Read more