Health Tech

Some see, not to mention make, art in unusual places. And so it is with U.K.-based musician Sivu, who is letting viewers peer inside his mind while he sings -- literally.

Reportedly inspired by the work being done on children born with cleft lips and palates at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, Sivu lay in an MRI scanner for almost three hours and sang his new single, "Better Man Than He," repeatedly. The resulting music video is an edit of that footage, relying on nothing but the relatively new real-time medical imaging technique often used … Read more

When the Country Fire Authority in Victoria, Australia, noticed that its firefighters were showing signs of heat stress even when their ear thermometer probes were reading normal temperatures, they decided it was time to find a better gauge in the hopes of preventing heat-related illnesses.

So they tested a smart pill on 50 firefighters evacuating 20 people from a burning medical center, and have already used the readings to change firefighter work patterns, including how long they're exposed to blazes, according to the Australian Associated Press.… Read more

Hospital-acquired infections have become a major killer in the United States, mainly because the drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause them have proven nearly impossible to stop.

But now IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology say they have come up with what they're calling an antimicrobial hydrogel that can successfully fight the superbugs that are behind killers like MRSA.

In an announcement today, IBM Research and its partner on the project said that their antimicrobial hydrogel was designed to cut through diseased biofilms and almost instantly kill off drug-resistant bacteria. The collaborators on the project said that … Read more

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease thought to play a role in the deaths (which are sometimes suicides) of athletes, soldiers, and others who have suffered concussions and repeated hits to the head, is currently only able to be diagnosed postmortem.

"After a while it gets old and not so fulfilling to take the brain out when [an athlete] is dead," Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon and director of the Brain Injury Research Institute, told CNN. "At that point there is no solution, no answer."

So a study co-authored by Bailes suggesting that PET scans … Read more

Some 10 million people around the world seek treatment for head trauma every year, and traumatic brain injury (TBI) is predicted to become the world's third leading cause of death and disability by 2020.

The Infrascanner Model 2000, a portable intracranial hematoma detector, just may put a dent in the death rate if it helps to quickly spot potential brain bleeds in TBI victims.

The handheld device, recently approved for both military and civilian use by the FDA, uses near-infrared (NIR) tech on eight different points of the brain. Because there is a higher concentration of hemoglobin in a … Read more

When a patient asked Laura Ferris, an assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, her opinion on smartphone apps that purport to distinguish between benign and malignant skin lesions, Ferris realized she'd never used one and decided to run images of melanomas through a few of the apps herself.

"When I saw the first few results come back of them being missed, I really started to get concerned," Ferris says in a school video. So she decided to investigate further, and reports this week in JAMA Dermatology that three out of four … Read more

We've seen fitness trackers before, but here's one with impressive smarts. The Amiigo can automatically identify more than 100 activities with custom algorithms.

Amiigo is a waterproof bracelet and shoe clip that not only counts how many bicep curls or golf swings you do, but monitors your heart rate, blood oxygen levels, skin temperature, activity level, and the number of calories burned, according to the gadget's crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.

Sensors and machine-learning algorithms identify the exercise you're performing, and store the data in the device before uploading it to your mobile device. The tech can discriminate between running on the treadmill, for instance, and exercising on an elliptical machine. … Read more

Meet the "apparatus for treating obesity by extracting food." That's what Dean Kamen's stomach pump is called in a recently granted U.S. patent, and it looks a lot less fun than Kamen's most famous invention, the Segway.

The good part is you can eat anything you like. The bad part is you have to get a tube put into your stomach and then suck the food out with a gadget called the AspireAssist.

Kamen and a team of physicians developed the pump as an obesity treatment that's reversible and, as they describe it, "minimally invasive." … Read more

Without the aid of a timer, how likely are you to brush your teeth for the recommended two minutes?

Not very, according to the folks behind a new smart toothbrush, the Beam Brush. They say the average person spends only 46 seconds brushing their teeth, but that a simple timer makes them 50 percent more likely to reach the two-minute mark.

So their Bluetooth-enabled brush, which debuted a year ago at CES, got FDA approval in June, and became available as of last week for $49.99, includes not only a sensor to track frequency and duration of brushing but also a timer that can play the user's music of choice for two minutes.… Read more