Health Tech

In Umea, Sweden, the forecast for Thursday is partly cloudy with a 10 percent chance of precipitation and a high of 25 degrees Fahrenheit. As I write this in dark and damp Portland, Ore., Umea doesn't sound so bad.

But the city, located some 400 miles north of the already northern Swedish capital Stockholm, is for most of the day this time of year cloaked in darkness, with the sun rising at almost 9 a.m. and setting just after 2 p.m.

So the local energy company Umea Energi has begun installing phototherapy lamps in 30 bus shelters … Read more

About to fly halfway around the world? You could pop some melatonin in hopes of easing your inevitable jet lag. Or you could don a pair of odd-looking goggles and pretend you're modeling the Ikea line of Geordi La Forge eyewear.

Re-Timer, a lightweight wearable device invented to reset the body's internal clock, launched last week. It emits a soft green light onto the eyes to stimulate the part of the brain responsible for regulating the body's 24-hour clock.

Light received by photoreceptors in our peepers sends a signal to our brains telling us to wake up and smell the alertness. But circumstances including jet lag, irregular work shifts, and lack of sunlight during winter months can mess with the light we need to maintain a well-timed body clock and natural energy levels.

Enter the Re-Timer, which is meant as an alternative to sleep-assisting drug therapy. … Read more

When it comes to detecting a wide range of extremely faint scents, including the primary vapor that emanates from TNT-based explosives, dogs are the gold standard. But researchers out of the University of California at Santa Barbara, report in the journal Analytical Chemistry that they just may have man's best friend beat -- in the form of a fingerprint-sized silicon microchip.

"Like a person, a dog can have a good day or a bad day, get tired or distracted," Carl Meinhart, a mechanical engineering professor who led the research, said in a school news release. "We … Read more

If you're the type who looks away when you get stuck with a needle, you may long for the day when "Star Trek"-style medical devices will painlessly flood our veins with every kind of drug imaginable.

For some women undergoing in vitro fertilization, daily intramuscular injections of progesterone in oil (PiO) can be painful and stressful. Infertility is already immensely taxing for some -- researchers have shown it can generate levels of anxiety and depression on a par with those from cancer, heart disease, and HIV.

Progesterone helps carry the pregnancy to term, but sometimes must be injected up to 70 times. PiOna is a concept auto-injector from Cambridge Consultants that not only hides the icky thing from sight, but provides feedback about when the 1.5-inch needle is ready to use and guides the user through the process. … Read more

MARANA, Ariz. - Three-dimensional printing: hype, or hope?

That's the question industry leaders sought to answer at the Techonomy conference here in the sunny greater Tucson area. A panel of experts -- Geomagic's Ping Fu, Shapeways' Peter Weijmarshausen and PARC's Stephen Hoover, with CNET's own Paul Sloan moderating -- discussed the promises, pitfalls and potential of a technology that allows almost anyone to turn a digital file into a perfect copy of a physical object, from puzzle pieces to airplane wings, in materials such as plastic, metal and rubberlike polymers.

Can 3D printing change the world? … Read more

The human skin, with all its frailties, turns out to be difficult to recreate, let alone improve on. The main challenge: It manages to be both self-healing and sensitive to the touch, enabling it to send vital information to the brain about temperature and pressure.

But chemists and engineers at Stanford say they are one step closer to developing an electronic skin that has both these properties, and they report this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology that it could help lead to smarter prosthetics and more resilient, self-repairing electronics.

Their central task was to find a self-healing material (a … Read more

Several months ago, my colleague Tim Hornyak wrote about the BeBionic 3 myoelectric prosthetic hand, a landmark prosthesis that enables a spectacular range of Terminator-like precise gripping and hand maneuverability.

A video making the rounds this week stars 53-year-old Nigel Ackland -- a wearer of the device -- who shows us that we've come extraordinarily far in prosthetic research, perhaps shockingly so if you don't keep up with the subject. … Read more

Devices that monitor inner ear activity could eventually be powered by the ear itself, according to research detailed in the current issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology by scientists from MIT, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI), and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

They say that for decades we have known the inner ear houses its own natural battery, but this is the first demonstration of its ability to power something external without compromising hearing.… Read more

After researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine called on the general public to find as many of Philadelphia's estimated 5,000 automated external defibrillators as possible, more than 300 "citizen scientists" stepped up and located 1,429 of them in more than 525 buildings across the city.

The eight-week crowdsourcing contest, called MyHeartMap Challenge, is part of what the researchers hope will be a national effort to catalog as many AEDs as possible and develop an interactive app of the registry so that laypeople can act quickly in the event someone nearby … Read more