News - Health Tech

Hair clip inspires device that clamps down traumatic bleeding

After three tours in Afghanistan as a trauma surgeon for the Canadian Navy, Dr. Dennis Filips was inspired -- by a simple hair clip -- to design a medical clamp that can stop traumatic wound bleeding in a matter of seconds.

Now the device, due to hit the market in multiple countries later this year, has earned Filips the top innovator award at last week's Life Science and Health Care Ventures Summit in New York.

The ITClamp will "level the playing field for everybody," Filips recently told the Edmonton Journal. (His firm, Innovative Trauma Care, is based in Edmonton.) "more

Early-warning software could reduce false alarms of seizures

Of the 50 million people worldwide estimated to have epilepsy, almost a third do not respond to treatment. Those patients must rely on implantable anti-seizure devices that detect pre-seizure electrical activity and shoot small electrical impulses to the brain to interrupt the seizures.

The downside is that the tech, still early in development, also produces false positives, causing devices to send currents to the brain when a seizure is not actually occurring. One new approach, developed by a biomedical and electrical engineer at Johns Hopkins University, appears to reduce those false alarms.

Tested on real-time recordings of brain activity in more

Routine mammography's potential harm: Overdiagnosis

Routine mammography screening, widely considered crucial in early breast cancer detection, may in fact be doing its job too well.

It turns out that as many as a quarter of the early cancers detected by mammography would not progress. That suggests early detection results in a great deal of unnecessary treatment and stress, according to a Harvard School of Public Health analysis of a nationwide screening program in Norway.

"Radiologists have been trained to find even the smallest of tumors in a bid to detect as many cancers as possible to be able to cure breast cancer," lead author and more

Microfluidic chip to quickly diagnose the flu

During the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, which spread across more than 200 countries and killed more than 18,000 people, it became clear that flu diagnosis was often taking too long and resulting in frequent false negatives.

Today, researchers from Boston University, Harvard, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are reporting in the journal PLoS ONE that they have built a microfluidic chip that rivals in accuracy the gold-standard diagnostic test known as RT-PCR but is faster, cheaper, and disposable.

For their four-year study, which involved 146 patients with flu-like symptoms and was funded by the National Institutes more

Living 'gut-on-a-chip' to help study intestinal disorders

After describing a living, breathing "lung-on-a-chip" in Science back in the summer of 2010, Harvard researchers are now reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip on their latest endeavor: a human gut-on-a-chip.

These bio-inspired micro devices that mimic the structures, behaviors, and environments of human organs could help scientists better understand the inner workings of a variety of diseases and disorders -- in this case intestinal ones such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis -- without resorting to often less reliable animal testing.

The latest so-called "gut-on-a-chip" is a silicon polymer device whose central chamber is lined by more

Paging Dr. iPhone: ThermoDock takes your temperature

The Medisana ThermoDock gets you one step closer to having a medical toolkit like Dr. McCoy on "Star Trek." This is an infrared device that plugs into your iPhone. Point it at your forehead, your dog, or your iPad 3, and take its temperature.

The nice thing about infrared is that you don't have to stick the ThermoDock where the sun don't shine. That means your iPhone stays at a safe distance from steaming coffee mugs, people carrying around flu germs, and grumpy children.

This gadget can also be used to check the ambient temperature of your room or the great outdoors. As we like to say here in New Mexico, "It's a dry heat!"

Hospital alarm system will sound when people light up

Calling itself one of the most modern and well-equipped hospitals in all of Europe, Scotland's 2-year-old and $480 million Forth Valley Royal Hospital is hoping that a new alarm system will help deter smokers who continue to ignore no-smoking signs outside the main entrance.

The alarm, which is followed by a presumably shaming loudspeaker message to stop breaking the rules, is sensitive enough to be triggered by a single smoker lighting up. A representative of the company that installed the machine said in a hospital statement that its purpose is twofold: to encourage better health and to keep the more

Pocket Brain app offers searchable 3D atlas of the brain

Of all the subjects best taught in 3D, anatomy has got to be up there. And when it comes to human anatomy, the brain is arguably the most complex organ, if not system, of them all.

So it's fitting that 3-year-old medical education app publisher eMedia out of Ireland is adding the Pocket Brain app to its suite of 3D Pocket Anatomy offerings. (First came the body and the heart.) For $19.99, the interactive app for iPhone and iPad renders the old-fashioned textbook pretty close to obsolete.

Japanese researchers led by Masaharu Komori, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Kyoto University, recently demoed the Permoveh, or Personal Mobility Vehicle, as a prototype next-generation wheelchair.

The Permoveh has four wheels of the same size, and each wheel contains 32 rollers that can rotate in a perpendicular direction to the rim. As the vid below shows, the vehicle can move in any direction when the user operates a hand-held control.

When the user wants to travel forward or back, the wheels alone move; when going sideways, the rollers move. When traveling diagonally, both wheels and rollers move.

MIT study: Light alone can activate specific memories

In a famous surgery in the early 1900s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, trying to treat epilepsy, found that stimulating specific neurons while patients were under local anesthesia caused them to vividly recall complex events. The mind, then, is based on matter, Penfield concluded.

Now researchers at MIT say they put this observation to the test in a rigorous study showing that the direct reactivation of specific hippocampus neurons can lead to very specific memory recall. And to do this, all they used was light.

"We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific memory, more