Medical tools

Software developed during a summer course at Stanford University could one day radically shift the way the visually impaired use modern tablets, potentially removing the need for a wireless Braille display.

Adam Duran, a senior at New Mexico State University, has developed a stunning way for blind people to type on tablets. Duran created the touch-screen Braille writer software with Adrian Lew, a Stanford assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a doctoral candidate.

It's all in the fingertips. The eight keys (similar to a standard Braille keyboard) in the software do not have a predefined position, but rather work with the location of the fingers. A user simply presses eight fingers anywhere on the screen, and voila, the keys are automatically oriented to that location.

If there's a problem, users simply lift their fingers and put them down again. As shown in the video below, typing is a breeze. Curiously missing is the mention of haptic feedback (vibration), or voice support, but for a first version this software is very encouraging. … Read more

Eight months and several hurdles after receiving 510(k) clearance, mobile-health company Mobisante says its smartphone ultrasound device is officially on the market.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance alone took so long that the MobiUS system--intended to be used in fetal, abdominal, cardiac, pelvic, and peripheral vessel imaging--only works with the 2-year-old Windows Mobile 6.5-based Toshiba TG01 smartphone and requires a USB 2.0 port for the probe. In other words, it won't be compatible with iPhones and Android-based phones, which don't support USB 2.0.… Read more

What do you get when you combine an Android smartphone, cell phone image sensor, Lego building blocks, and a handful of Caltech engineers and biologists? The ePetri, which isn't Petri Dish 2.0, but a full reworking of a technology that dates back to the late 1800s.

Traditionally, the Petri dish (named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri) has been used in the medical field to identify bacterial infections by studying samples via microscope as the cultured cells grow in an incubator.

The Caltech researchers have a few choice words for such an approach in 2011, including "expensive," "labor-intensive," and "suboptimal." So they set out to improve not just the dish, but the entire process.… Read more

It's no secret that as we age, our vision deteriorates. Over time, our eyes tend to lose their ability to focus on nearby objects. I know what that's like. I'm farsighted.

I've always been told my poor eyesight is unavoidable and unfixable. So I felt hopeful at hearing that an iPhone app called GlassesOff promises to "help you achieve over 80 percent improvement in vision acuity" by training your brain to more efficiently process the blurred images that result from near-vision deterioration.… Read more

The airflow of a typical human breath travels at less than 2 meters per second. Instead of lamenting its weakness, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try to make a material that could react to this airflow in such a way as to convert it to electrical energy.

So they turned to polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a material in which an electrical charge can build up in response to applied mechanical stress. (There's even a name for this: the piezoelectric effect.) The trick, then, was to get this material thin enough to be sufficiently stressed by human breath.

"We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face," says Xudong Wang, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who reports on these findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Wang's team had go about thinning this material very carefully, so as to preserve its piezoelectric properties. They used an ion-etching process that, with some improvements, might eventually enable them to control thickness to the submicron level.

The obvious benefits of using respiration to power biomedical devices (think blood glucose monitors or pacemakers) are that the source is local and it is consistent.… Read more

A team of physicists and engineers out of the University of California at Davis are taking the iPhone 4 to new heights--and they're not talking about No. 5.

Using materials that cost about as much as a typical app, they tricked out an iPhone with a few new tools, including a microscope, which--with the phone's camera--could identify features as small as 1.5 microns. That's small enough to identify different blood cell types.

"Field workers could put a blood sample on a slide, take a picture, and send it to specialists to analyze," says Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu, a physicist at the Center for Biophotonics, Science and Technology and lead author of the research to be presented in mid-October at the Optical Society's Annual Meeting in San Jose, Calif.

In rural clinics in developing nations, which tend to have limited if any lab equipment, these decked-out iPhones could help nurses and doctors diagnose a range of blood diseases by not only imaging blood cells but sending data in real time to colleagues anywhere around the world for further analysis.… Read more

Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed tiny gold-studded scaffolds that can be used to build tissue in which cells have a synchronous beat, a possible repair tool for treating heart-attack victims.

In a study reported in Nature Nanotechnology, Daniel Kohane, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and colleagues improved the electrical conductivity of scaffolds used to grow cardiac cells.

They devised a new scaffold material but based it on alginate, an organic substance that's already used in tissue scaffolds. They combined the alginate with a solution containing gold nanowires, which are good conductors.

After cardiac cells were seeded on the composite scaffold, the researchers compared the conductivity of the gold-enhanced cells with cells grown on regular alginate. They checked each for the presence of calcium, which helps electrical signals travel in the tissue. … Read more

Robots are playing increasingly important roles in surgery, but what about post-op care? Panasonic has developed a robot with telepresence functions can help bedridden patients communicate with loved ones, and upgraded its robot bed and hair-washer.

Hospi-Rimo is a communications robot aimed at helping patients chat with their doctors when they're not around--or talk with distant friends and family.

Based on the electronics giant's Hospi drug-delivery bot, Hospi-Rimo can be remote-controlled or move around autonomously. It can automatically move to specified locations, avoiding obstacles en route.

The machine has a large screen (naturally with a happy face) and sensors to learn about its environment. Panasonic says it could be used in hospitals (like its precursor Hospi) or residences where elderly people live alone.

The company's hair-washing robot, introduced last year, has 24 fingers and provides bubble and hand washes. Improvements include refined head-scanning to provide custom washing, conditioning, and drying functions, and user-set spot massages.

Announced in 2009 and then commercialized, the RoboticBed is basically an electric wheelchair that morphs into a fully adjustable bed. It now has a power-assist tilt function to prevent slippage during long periods of sitting, as well as a simplified control interface.

The latest prototypes of the three robots will be shown off at the International Home Care & Rehabilitation Exhibition (HCR) 2011 next month in Tokyo. … Read more

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara are introducing a novel technique using a form of laser spectroscopy and biotags that help discriminate between cancerous and healthy cells.

While the tech is likely years away from clinical trials, the team hopes it will eventually lead to a microdevice that can predict when prostate cancer will metastasize--which is key, given it is the metastasis throughout the body, not the primary tumor, that kills prostate cancer patients.

"The delay is not well understood," says Gary Braun, biologist and second author of the paper that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. &… Read more