medical

Two members of the U.S. Congress are asking government auditors to investigate the security risks of wireless medical devices, after they learned of a security researcher who found he could remotely control his own insulin pump and blood-sugar monitor.

Representatives Anna G. Eshoo, a California Democrat, and Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, senior members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office earlier this week asking the GAO to examine whether the Federal Communications Commission is ensuring that new medical devices and implants that use wireless technology can't be tampered … Read more

Researchers have built a battery that's six times thinner than a bacterium. The microscopic power pack could be used to run all sorts of minuscule electronic devices, including sensors that spy on single cells.

Does this mean we'll start seeing commercials for the Energizer bacterium? At 150 nanometers wide, the nano battery is hundreds of times thinner than a human hair and more than 60,000 times smaller than a AAA battery. How many "A"s is that?

The little battery, developed at Rice University, is actually a cross between a battery and a supercapacitor. Supercapacitors can deliver more power at once than batteries--a bigger jolt. The diminutive battery is made by the thousands in dense arrays. Each battery is a nanowire, with one half of the wire working as a negative electrode and the other half as a positive electrode.… Read more

A New York City hospital is using patients' palms, not insurance cards, to pull up their records, according to a new report.

The New York University Langone Medical Center started scanning palms last month to reduce paperwork and prevent identity theft, the New York Daily News reports, using a device that images the veins in a patient's hand.

Shaped like a butter tray, the black PatientSecure device uses infrared light to scan palms, then links the unique biometric trait to a patient's electronic health records.

That's right: no need to pore through a purse for an insurance … Read more

The Food and Drug Administration is looking for input on a new proposal that would let it regulate certain medical apps that run on mobile devices.

Noting that today's crop of mobile medical apps can perform a variety of tasks, from counting calories to helping people monitor their weight to letting doctors view patient scans, the agency wants to ensure that such apps are safe.

"The use of mobile medical apps on smartphones and tablets is revolutionizing health care delivery," Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a … Read more

More lifelike, functional prosthetics for lost fingers may soon be more readily available as mechanical digits known as X Fingers are set to be mass-produced within six months, according to inventor Dan Didrick.

X Fingers are fashioned out of surgical steel and bend naturally with the movement of residual fingers. They're simple, lightweight, body-powered, and don't require any electronics or electricity.

The removable devices can be covered in thermoplastic for a lifelike appearance. Depending on the configuration they're sometimes anchored in a wrist strap.

Florida-based Didrick was motivated in part by a desire to help a hearing-impaired person regain sign language ability after losing fingers. He whittled his first concept prototype out of pine wood.

Then he began using 3D design software to refine his invention. Eight years after initial sketches, hundreds of X Fingers are in use today, and Didrick Medical has also produced X Thumbs.

There seems to be a big demand for these simple devices. Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor data, the company says about 8,000 work-related amputations occur each year involving one or more fingers. … Read more

In the words of William Gibson, the future is already here. It may be barely Google-able in an obscure scientific publication, but it has profound implications for the future of implantable medical (and other) sensors.

That future is a nanoscale device that manages to transmit data wirelessly up to 30 feet and operate without a battery, instead harvesting energy from the environment via such sources as the pulse of a blood vessel or the gust of a breeze.

"It is entirely possible to drive these devices by scavenging energy from sources in the environment such as gentle airflow, vibration, … Read more

With millions of implantable medical devices in the U.S. alone, and some 300,000 more people receiving them worldwide every year, the need to protect these wireless devices from being hacked is increasingly urgent.

Wearers might soon be better protected, thanks to new work out of MIT and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, so long as they don't mind walking around in invisible shields.

The system the research team will be proposing at the Association for Computing Machinery's Sigcomm conference in Toronto this August uses a jamming transmitter small enough to be worn as a watch or necklace.

The device would essentially be authorized to access the implant and send encrypted instructions to the transmitter (the team calls this the "shield"), which would in turn decode the encryption and relay the instructions to the implant.

Using a device that is separate from the medical implant is key for a few reasons: it allows for post-encryption in devices that are already implanted; it enables authorized emergency responders to simply remove the patient's shield in the event of emergencies; and it doesn't require the size of the implants to increase to accommodate and power the shield.

The new system expands on a technique recently developed at Stanford University that allows for sending and receiving signals in the same frequency band. In typical wireless technology, using the same frequency band interferes with the signal, but by employing three antennas positioned precise distances apart, one band can now be used.… Read more

As many hospitals and health care centers across the U.S. switch from paper record-keeping to newer, electronic health record systems that qualify them for federal incentives, a team of physician-scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College has been tracking the transition for 19 physicians at an adult ambulatory clinic.

Nearly 4,000 prescriptions for more than 2,000 patients were tracked before the switch, 12 weeks after the switch, and a year after the switch. Researchers found that prescription errors dropped by two-thirds, from 36 percent to 12 percent a year after their physicians had switched to electronic record-keeping systems.… Read more

It's inspiring to visit a university laboratory and see fresh-faced college students working on experiments that may some day have huge impacts on our lives. And on our trip to the University of California at Berkeley this week we found just that. In the campus' Stanley Hall, there's a team of researchers working on a new blood-analysis chip or Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System (SIMBAS), that can potentially detect hundreds of diseases at once in a matter of minutes.

During my campus visit with cameraman and editor Jared Kohler, we interviewed bioengineering Professor Luke Lee and post-doctoral … Read more