Health tech

When it comes to certain diseases -- think heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers -- some basic lifestyle changes are the best preventive medicine.

And while most of us know to eat a balanced diet, exercise, and abstain from smoking, it can be far more motivating to make healthy changes if we also know we're prone to certain diseases.

Enter Zuum, a free new iPad app that estimates your risk of common diseases and personalizes tips to prevent them and improve your overall health.… Read more

If you're not afraid to swallow your technology, you may want to check out new tech cleared by the Food and Drug Administration this week that lets you ingest a digital sensor powered by stomach acid that alerts your doctors about your health and your treatment habits.

The technology consists of a tiny, silicon-based sensor that, at 1mm wide (roughly the size of a grain of sand), can be consumed via pills and pharmaceuticals and pass through the body much like high-fiber food.

According to the developer, Proteus Digital Health, once the sensor is swallowed, stomach fluids that come into contact with it provide enough power to relay a signal that documents exactly when it was taken. This data is transmitted to a battery-powered patch worn on the skin that detects the signal and records the exact time the sensor was swallowed.… Read more

Last month, a paralyzed man sent his first tweet using eye movements. A new technology out of France could allow him not only to type, but to draw and sign his name in cursive on a computer.

The technique, described in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, relies on a novel head-mounted display that uses a camera to track eye movements and then relays that movement data to a computer.

Discovered by a Paris scientist studying optical illusions, the technique tricks the neuromuscular machinery into overcoming a natural phenomenon known as saccadic eye movements. … Read more

Pew pew! From disc drives to sci-fi shooters, we live in a world full of laser beams. And a special laser made waves in the world of medical research this week. Developed by laser applications researchers from the University of Tennessee's Space Institute, it could one day find use as a weapon against cancer.

Known as a femtosecond laser, the high-speed light pulses at one-quadrillionth of a second; when fine-tuned, the powerful beam can be used by doctors to detect, map, and nullify cancerous tumors. … Read more

Public restrooms can really test your senses, especially if you're super fastidious about cleanliness. Thankfully, as automation becomes more commonplace, we get to enjoy futuristic time savers like Camitool, a touch-free toilet paper dispenser by Japanese company Shikoku.

You may wonder if toilet paper dispensers need any further optimization, but this product addresses some valid points. A touch-free dispenser lets those with conditions like rheumatism collect toilet paper much more easily, and it reduces the chance that infectious diseases will get spread by removing hands from the equation. Less hands mean less germs. … Read more

All fat is not equal. Brown adipose tissue, more commonly called brown fat and abundant in both newborns and hibernating mammals, is the good fat, playing a prominent role in how quickly our bodies burn calories.

Brown fat also produces as much as 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham, so these scientists have developed a thermal imaging technique to measure not only a person's brown fat stores but also how much heat that fat produces.… Read more

A wireless musical glove developed at Georgia Tech not only teaches users to play songs on the piano, but may also improve the sensation and mobility of the hands of people who have suffered spinal cord injuries, researchers report.

The Mobile Music Touch (MMT) device, which works alongside a computer and a keyboard, improved rehabilitation even in patients who had sustained the injury more than a year earlier -- a point at which improvements tend to be minimal at best.… Read more

Got a new mole? A bad sunburn? A family member with a skin cancer diagnosis?

UMSkinCheck, a free new app for iPhone and iPad developed at the University of Michigan, includes a risk calculator that will help you determine your individual risk. If you have any concern at all, it guides you through taking a series of 23 photos that cover your entire body to develop a baseline for future photo comparisons.

"Whole body photography is a well-established resource for following patients at risk for melanoma," Michael Sabel, lead physician in app development and associate professor of surgery … Read more

When I started reading about Lumoback's Kickstarter campaign this morning, my left foot was curled under my right thigh and my back was slouched so far forward it was almost cartoonish. A few sentences in and I was sitting tall, but by the end of the page a few minutes later I was back to my old ways, an offense I'll surely pay for in ibuprofen costs in the years to come.

Enter Lumoback, the sensor and app that hopes to rise above its competition. (Yes, there are several sensors and apps aimed at improving posture.) And having hit its $100,000 goal in a matter of days, with 26 left on the calendar, it looks like it will at the very least see a round of production.

The brainchild of three Stanford grads -- an engineer, physician, and entrepreneur -- Lumoback is essentially a sleek little waistband that tracks movement data and syncs wirelessly to an iPhone 4S or new iPad. The team says it's prioritizing support for Android as well.… Read more