heart

Dano's iHeart Locket takes the wearable technology trend and makes it cute. The smart necklace works with the iPad to lock down digital diary entries and keep secret crushes and innermost thoughts safe from prying eyes.

The gold heart necklace, designed with preteens and teens in mind, works with the iHeart Locket Diary App for iOS. The diary app holds text, pictures, speech-to-text audio, and written notes, making it more of a digital scrapbook than a simple journal.… Read more

Heart Booth HD - Free is an odd photo editing app that lets you edit your photos to create a shape, such as a heart, check mark, or X. Confused? Well, so were we after putting this app to the test. Vague directions and features left us scratching our heads.

Heart Booth HD - Free opens with a grid containing a heart. Buttons line the left and right sides of the screen, and a row of menu options line the bottom, as well. A banner ad sits at the top. Just looking at the buttons, we had no idea where … Read more

My boyfriend is a little different than most. His name is Taira-kun. He's big and strong, though his arms are tiny. He's actually a Tyrannosaurus rex, but I don't seem to hold that against him. I'm all caught up in Jurassic Heart, an online dating simulator that pairs you up with an extinct beast for a love interest.

The sim gives you difficult choices to make, like which hair clip to wear before meeting your big lug. Naturally, the meat-on-the-bone hair clip is the one to go with. Cute and yummy.

According to the sim, Taira and I have a lot in common. We both like meat. We both play the ukulele (at least I do in real life), though it doesn't get into the specifics of how the necktie-wearing dino manages to play the tiny instrument. The sim takes you through meeting up with your carniverous heartthrob, buying a ukulele, eating grilled chicken in the park, and taking a romantic evening walk.… 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

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

Internet radio and music services offer a lot of customization options that allow us to focus on just the music. However, if you feel a bit out of touch with what's happening in the world around you, iHeartRadio's new Add-ins might be able to help. The new Add-ins insert local news, traffic, and weather updates to your custom stations every hour.

To enable Add-ins, log in to your iHeartRadio account on the Web and go to the Add-ins section in Settings. iHeartRadio will use your current location to provide local updates, or you can manually set a location … Read more

Slacker Radio (free) This is a great option for listening to streaming radio, with an intuitive interface that makes it easy to find what you want quickly. To use Slacker you must sign up for an account or log in with your Facebook credentials.

You can search for artists using a field at the top; check out the Music Guide curated by Slacker; or search by genres, stations you've previously listened to, specialty stations, or news, talk, and sports stations. Each selection on the first screen leads to another list where you can swipe to browse selections to find … Read more

I'll be honest. Vague phrases like "inner balance," "emotional resilience," and "coherence zone," all of which HeartMath uses to describe its new heart rate monitor and corresponding app, aggravate me a bit. After test-driving the product this week, however, I can overlook the language.

Think of the system as a mobile meditation guide. Available as of yesterday on iTunes, HeartMath's free Inner Balance app works exclusively with its Inner Balance earlobe sensor for iOS ($99), which is available at the company's online store or through many major retailers. It uses emWave technology to show the user's heart rhythm pattern (HRV) and trains the user to change that pattern to a healthier, "coherent" state.

The system is easy to set up and, more importantly, use regularly. After installing the app, simply clip the sensor to your earlobe, plug it into your iPhone or iPad using a standard 30-pin connector (you'll need a Lightning-to-30-pin adapter for iPhone 5), and tap the screen to start.… Read more

Cardio med tech company Biotronik today announced Food and Drug Administration approval of the world's first implantable cardiac defibrillator that uses just one lead to sense atrial arrhythmias.

Say what?

For those unfamiliar with the mechanics of the heart, let's back up. Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common heat arrhythmia, occurs when the electrical signals in the atria (the heart's two upper chambers) fire fast and frenetically, causing the atria to essentially quiver instead of pulse regularly, which can result in blood pooling or clotting and thus greatly increase the risk of stroke and congestive heart failure.… Read more