Medical tools

Brain scan finds man was not in a coma--23 years later

Rom Houben has been trapped in a series of worst nightmares, including trying for 23 years to alert those around him that he was not in a coma. A new report suggests he's not alone in his experience.

In 1983, Belgian engineering student and martial arts enthusiast Houben, then 20, was in a car accident that was thought to have left him in a vegetative state. Doctors relied on the widely-used Glasgow Coma Scale, assessing his eyes, verbal, and motor responses. What they failed to notice was that Houben was actually conscious--but completely paralyzed.

"I screamed, but there … Read more

Bedside vital signs monitor goes mobile

When a caregiver leaves a patient's hospital room, or when that patient is transferred from one ward to another, it can be tricky to monitor vital signs without interruption. What if that data all fit on one screen in the palm of the caregiver's hand?

The 120-year-old German medical technology company Drager has built the Infinity Acute Care System to constantly improve hospital processes and procedures, and the suite's new Infinity M540, released at Medica 2009, is designed to make the continuous reading and monitoring of vital signs much easier.

The monitor travels with the patient from … Read more

Germ alert: Attack of the killer necktie!

You may not know it, but deep within the ivory towers of hospitals a debate is raging over the future of the doctor's necktie. One company has turned the debate into an opportunity with a tie whose stain-resistant coating actually thwarts microbes.

Much evidence has emerged in recent years that doctors wearing ties might actually cause as much harm to patients as doctors who don't wash their hands. In one 2004 study of 42 doctors and medical staffers at the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, almost 50 percent of the neckties were host to bacteria that … Read more

A stethoscope app? Be still my beating heart

If you're the kind of person who likes to take scissors to old gadgets, this one's for you. Start-up RidRx is now selling an adapter to connect old stethoscopes to an iPhone or iPod Touch, along with a phone dock/holder and an app that translates the audio your stethoscope captures into such delightful digital accoutrements as sound spectrograms.

And yes, the firm's easy-to-follow instructions include taking trauma shears to your old 'scope to fit it to the patent-pending iStetho Adapter. So the whole process, from tinkering with hardware to taking current heart-rate readings with the iStethoscope … Read more

IBM chip to speed medical diagnostic testing

IBM researchers have cooked up a quick medical diagnostic testing system based on a silicon chip that can get by on a small sample and test for multiple diseases.

The breakthrough to be announced Tuesday means that physicians can test a patient immediately following a heart attack to improve survival rates. The test checks for disease markers, proteins that can be detected in blood using "capillary action force." In a nutshell, capillary forces refer to the tendency of a liquid to rise in narrow tubes or be drawn into a small opening.

The IBM Research-Zurich findings will be … Read more

Cough into your cell phone, not your sleeve

We've already written this week about using cell phone imaging to analyze a blood sample and diagnose disease. Because viruses such as influenza are smaller than light waves, diagnosing something like H1N1 is not yet possible.

Thankfully, the sounds of our coughs might be all we need to diagnose whether we have a cough, flu, or respiratory disease. It all boils down to the quality of a cough, such as whether it is dry or wet (aka "productive" or "unproductive"), where the presence or absence of mucus on the lungs helps to determine the cause … Read more

How your cell phone can diagnose disease

To picture the next-gen microscope, don't picture a microscope at all. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is adapting cell phones to sample biological images.

This is no iPhone app. Ozcan, who formed the company Microskia (on the heels of the UC Berkeley team that developed CellScope), has built a prototype whose cell phone camera sensor can detect a slide's contents at a cellular level--reading, for example, an increase in white blood cell count that might indicate a new infection or injury. That information can then be forwarded wirelessly to a lab or hospital.

The brilliance of Ozcan's design is that magnification is done electronically, requiring no lens. (CellScope, on the other hand, takes a more conventional approach as a miniature microscope with expensive lenses.) … Read more

Microsoft launching health tech video show

Aiming to reinforce its medical pedigree, Microsoft next week is launching a video show on developments in the health care technology arena.

The show's host, Bill Crounse, senior director of worldwide health at Microsoft, is a veteran of both broadcasting and medicine, having served as a broadcaster and practicing physician before joining Microsoft. In a chat on Friday, Crounse promised that the show itself won't be an ad for Microsoft's health care software, though the company is sponsoring the first few episodes with some short commercials.

"It's about demonstrating our investment and commitment to the … Read more

Patients administer HIV tests as accurately as pros

Studies suggest that anywhere from 2 to 13 percent of patients in emergency rooms are HIV positive, according to Charlotte Gaydos, a clinical microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University. So the emergency room seemed like a logical place to test whether an untrained person is able to self-administer his or her own HIV test, and then accurately read the results (one line means negative, two lines mean positive).

In an urban hospital, researchers from Johns Hopkins offered people in the emergency room the option to test themselves for HIV while they waited. More than 90 percent of the people they asked … Read more

Robotic arm reaches out to kids with motor deficit

Updated at 10 a.m. PDT October 20 with specific model of robotic arm used.

A robotic arm is lending a hand to children with dyspraxia, a motor-skills deficit also known as Developmental Coordination Disorder or Clumsy Child Syndrome.

The system, under development at the U.K.'s University of Leeds, combines a commercially available Phantom Omni haptic device with software that lets children with coordination problems practice therapist-prescribed exercises at home using an interactive desktop setup. It can also monitor how the kids move, measuring factors like smoothness, speed of movement, and joint configurations.

Guided by the robotic arm, for example, kids use a pen to push objects along a 3D track displayed on a computer screen. The system applies guiding forces to the child's arm and hand to help control movements. The strength of the forces can be altered to shape movements and vary the difficulty of the exercises.

"We originally started with a hospital-based system, but our user group of children said they'd much prefer to be able to use it at home after school, so we adapted it to a more suitable laptop-based system that fits inside a small holdall," said Mark Mon-Williams, a University of Leeds professor of cognitive psychology who is leading the research, in a statement. "They also got involved in the design of the games and exercises."

The Leeds team is collaborating with researchers at universities in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Indiana, with funding from U.K. children's health charity Action Medical Research.

Dyspraxia is a neurologically based disorder that affects the ability to see a movement goal through to completion. Children with dyspraxia struggle with skillful, controlled actions, making simple, daily tasks such as buttoning their coats more difficult. Handwriting often suffers, which can lead to homework struggles and ultimately a loss of self-confidence. … Read more