Medical tools

Within five years, soldiers who suffer facial burns could have their faces regrown by wearing intelligent biomechanical masks, according to research out of the University of Texas at Arlington.

Eileen Moss of the university's Automation & Robotics Research Institute is collaborating with the U.S. Army and Northwestern University to build a prototype Biomask equipped with tiny sensors and actuators.

Under conventional treatment, damaged tissue is removed and replaced with grafts. The procedure, however, can sometimes produce speech problems, deformities, and scarring; it can require multiple operations.

The Biomask consists of a rigid, face-shaped shell and covering flexible polymer layers that contain arrays of electrical and mechanical components. … Read more

Male birth control hasn't progressed since condoms and vasectomies were devised more than 100 years ago. And while the idea of using therapeutic ultrasound to zap sperm has been kicked around for decades, it has never been sufficiently reliable for contraception.

Until now.

Researchers have now found that a commercially available therapeutic ultrasound generator and transducer can significantly deplete the sperm count of rats. The team, based out of the University of North Carolina, relied on funding from the Parsemus Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The results are notable because they improve on the only promising … Read more

After taking second place in the 2011 Imagine Cup finals, Team Lifelens of the U.S. is one of four teams from around the world to win a $75,000 Imagine Cup grant, Microsoft announced today at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The Lifelens project is run by students at universities across the country who have been working since November 2010 on an app that can image malaria cells for fast diagnosis right there on the phone, sans Internet.

The premise is straightforward. Apply a blood sample to a slide with a dye that only malaria … Read more

Glucose levels are 100 times more concentrated in blood than in saliva, which is why in spite of many efforts to use saliva, diabetics are still pricking themselves to get accurate glucose readings.

But now, harnessing the power of nanotechnology, engineers at Brown University say they've designed a biochip that can measure glucose levels in saliva almost as accurately as current devices can measure levels in blood.

To do this, the engineers etched a complicated array of thousands of plasmonic interferometers (no, this is not an episode of Farscape) onto a fingernail-size biochip. This means they were essentially using … Read more

Any budding Dr. Frankensteins in the house? Here's a robot that's not only good for DIY surgery, it's open-source too.

The Raven II was developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Washington and modeled on a system originally designed for military use. Five newly completed systems are being shipped to test centers throughout the U.S.

While the da Vinci Surgical System has been widely used for prostate and other surgeries because it's minimally invasive, the machine is very expensive and not portable. It also uses proprietary software.

The Raven II is more affordable at about $250,000 and its Linux-based operating system lets users modify code. Seven Raven IIs at centers including Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University will be linked together for collaborative experiments, according to UC Santa Cruz. … Read more

Eye drops are so 1.0. Not only can they be messy and inconvenient to apply, they deliver medicine to treat dryness and other issues in imprecise volumes so quickly that they need to be reapplied every few hours.

And for those applying eye drops after laser eye surgery--when the eyes are especially tender--they can be a real pain.

Which is why researchers at the University of Florida are working to design contact lenses already helpful in protecting the eyes post-surgery that can extend the release time of anesthesia to help with this post-surgery pain.

The trick, chemist Anuj Chauhan … Read more

My 85-year-old grandmother wouldn't do well on a bike on the open road. Her vision, hearing, and cognition have all declined enough to make such an expedition something of a death sentence. But those indoor stationary bikes are just so...boring.

Which is why researchers launched the Cybercycle Study in 2008 in an effort to explore what kinds of benefits older adults might reap from riding stationary bikes with interactive video game features.

What they found is that the cybercyclists demonstrated greater cognitive benefits than those who rode traditional stationary bikes without the virtual enhancement, according to their article … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Those who scoured the health and wellness zones at CES both this year and last may be wondering why they came at all in 2012. Many of the gadgets and services were either already in the works last year or being held behind the curtain for future reveals.

Within the designated Fitness TechZone in the North Hall, a few sub- or satellite genres were nearly empty or devoid of cutting-edge tech. Being six months pregnant, I had a personal interest in Mommy Tech this year. Yet when I approached BabyPlus(one of the only booths in the tiny Mommy … Read more

Ah, we are but mere mortals, and scientific research has a way of reminding us precisely how.

Not only has one recent study found that humans can experience age-related neurological decline as early as 45, but scientists are also reporting in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine that positron emission tomography (PET) can safely and accurately detect dementia early on.

The technique, according to lead author Nicolaas Bohnen in a news release, not only helps diagnose dementia, but also improves physician confidence: "This process can be difficult for physicians, especially when evaluating younger patients or those who have subtle signs … Read more