About a decade ago, wireless heart monitors hooked to patients at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas went on the fritz, causing much scrambling among the building's engineering team.
The culprit, as it turned out, was interference from a nearby broadcast television station, which was testing its digital signal on the same channel where some of the medical devices operated, as detailed in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology a few years ago. The Federal Communications Commission ultimately cordoned off spectrum just for that purpose, although migrating there was largely voluntary.
Now, hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear similar problems could happen again if federal regulators don't place limits on requests by Google, Microsoft, and other high-tech companies to free up spectrum "white spaces" between television channels.
Those companies and consumer advocacy groups have been agitating in recent years for unlicensed use of those unused pockets because their signals can propagate long distances and penetrate walls, making them uniquely disposed to gigabits-per-second mobile broadband service--"Wi-Fi on steroids" or "Wi-Fi 2.0," as Google telecommunications counsel Rick Whitt has taken to calling it.
The medical community, however, wants to ensure those plans don't imperil the safety of its patients.
"If a new white space application that's operating thousands of times more powerfully came online, either in the hospital or outside the hospital, it could very well directly interfere with the telemetry system and prevent patient monitoring," Tim Kottak, engineering general manager for GE Healthcare's systems and wireless division, said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com this week. "The whole system could be taken out, just like what happened at Baylor."
Since the late 1980s, medical telemetry devices, as they're known, have been used in virtually every hospital throughout the United States to keep tabs on patients' vital signs, such as their heart rate and blood oxygen levels, Kottak said.
A patient wears GE Healthcare's Apex Pro, a wireless medical telemetry device. Telemetry devices continuously measure a variety of vital signs and transmit data to a central location.
(Credit: GE Health Care)It works like this: The patient wears a small transmitter that's connected to a wireless network within the hospital, which consists of an antenna system and receivers. Through that system, doctors and nurses can generally check on the patient from anywhere in the hospital, without needing to be bedside, and the patient is meanwhile free to walk around to visit labs, get X-rays, and work on recovery without being tethered to equipment.
Unlike the National Association of Broadcasters, which has been the loudest opponent of the high-tech industry's white spaces plans, the medical industry isn't asking for a ban on all unlicensed TV white spaces uses by portable mobile devices. (General Electric, of course, also owns NBC Universal, a major broadcasting entity, but Kottak said his division isn't speaking for NBC in this matter.)
Rather, GE and others are seeking a compromise of sorts, in which certain channels would be off-limits, and device operators would be required to alert hospitals and other medical centers before deploying them nearby.
After the Baylor incident, FCC decided to set aside channel 37 of the broadcast TV band as a protected area for exclusive use by medical telemetry devices. But the FCC also allowed hospitals to continue operating existing devices on other TV white spaces, with the understanding that they would move be best served by moving to channel 37 eventually. It's operators of those older systems, which can cost millions of dollars to upgrade, that could face the rudest awakening if new gadgets come online without their knowledge, the medical industry says.
GE, for its part, would like to see the FCC continue to block off not only channel 37 but also adjacent channels 36 and 38, in an effort to create a greater buffer for its devices. It also wants the FCC to require new white spaces users to refrain from releasing new devices that use another popular location for medical telemetry devices--channels 33 to 35--for one year after any rules are developed so that hospitals have ample time to leave that spectrum. In addition, it's asking for the FCC to limit the power output of the new devices to reduce interference potential.
The American Society for Healthcare Engineering, a division of the American Hospital Association, has also weighed in, asking the Federal Communications Commission to require that anyone operating devices in the unused TV channels notify hospitals, nursing homes and other health facilities within range of the signals beforehand.
"With adequate advance notice, health care facilities operating these legacy systems can take steps either to identify the source of any interference and address it or to replace equipment that can no longer serve its intended purpose with newer, protected (channel 37) installations," Dale Woodin, deputy executive director of the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, wrote in a filing with the FCC.
Their recommendations may not be far off from reality. Google, for its part, has already embraced at least some of those suggestions, proposing in a recent filing with the FCC that unlicensed white spaces be prohibited from operating in a "safe harbor" between channels 36 and 38, specifically citing concerns over medical telemetry devices.
Brian Peters, a spokesman for the Wireless Innovation Alliance, which is pushing for the unlicensed white-space use, said discussions with GE are "ongoing" and voiced confidence that they can reach an agreeable solution that allows for unlicensed use of mobile broadband devices. The Wireless Innovation Alliance's members include companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell and HP, and consumer advocacy groups like Public Knowledge, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Free Press.
"We are also fully confident that the FCC engineers can write the rules necessary to prevent interference to medical devices," Peters said in an e-mail interview. "The FCC is the expert agency, and they've been managing medical device spectrum issues for years."
Even if the medical devices industry reaches an agreement with the high-tech companies, however, the broader white spaces debate is likely to continue. The National Association of Broadcasters hasn't budged from its position that allowing unlicensed devices on TV bands is "a guaranteed recipe for producing interference and should not be allowed under any circumstances." It also claims more than 70 members of Congress share its concerns, although that opposition is far from universal.
The FCC is currently retesting early-stage equipment designed to "sniff" for broadcast signals to ensure new devices don't operate there and cause interference. But it's not expected to issue any rules for the white spaces for another several months. Even then, the spectrum won't be available for use until at least February 2009, when over-the-air broadcasters are required to vacate that band as part of the congressionally mandated shift to all-digital television.
DUBLIN, Ireland--It knows when you are sleeping. It knows when you're awake.
"It" is neither Santa Claus nor a monster in the closet. Rather, it's technology from Dublin-based BiancaMed that can track and analyze a person's sleep and night-breathing patterns without disturbing the sleeper, said CTO Philip de Chazal. In contrast with some sleep analysis systems used in laboratories, the person doesn't need to wear electrodes or lie on a plastic pad. Instead, a wireless device tracks the sleeper's movements.
BiancaMed's Philip de Chazal with the front end of the Baby Monitor. Click for more photos of the company's device.
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)Software devised by BiancaMed separates the signals corresponding to breathing and other body movements. In the morning, users log on to a personal Web site to see when they were awake, when they slept, how long it took them to fall asleep, and other metrics, including sleep efficiency (that is, how much of time spent in bed was time spent sleeping).
Eventually, the company also wants to track people as they move through the different levels of sleeping.
BiancaMed's SleepMinder device is for adults. Its Baby Monitor system lets parents listen to their children sleeping--and if a child doesn't breathe for 15 seconds, it sends an alarm.
The idea here is to target the largely overlooked area of sleep therapy, de Chazal said. A good deal of attention--and gadgetry--has already been directed toward other areas of personal health, from sports and fitness to eldercare.
Sleep ranks right up there with a good diet and exercise in staying healthy, de Chazal said. Lack of sleep, meanwhile, has been associated with a host of problems, from overeating to poor performance at work or school. More than 82 million Americans, or roughly 40 percent of the teen and adult population, suffer from some form of regular insomnia.
"Sleep is the final frontier," de Chazal said. "There is very little attention on it."
BiancaMed was spun out of NovaUCD, the technology incubator at University College Dublin. In an effort to boost its tech economy, Ireland is plunking money into research and development with the intent to commercialize interesting ideas. Overall, Ireland wants to double the number of Ph.D.s that graduate in the hard sciences by 2013. Many of the major universities here revved up technology incubators in the past few years.
Many scientists see the attraction right away. Others need prompting, said Pat Frain, who runs NovaUCD.
"We make sure they know that funding could be cut if there is no economic benefit," Frain said.
BiancaMed got its start by developing a wireless sensor for detecting sleep apnea for a company called ResMed. It takes only a couple of nights to determine whether someone has the condition. Sleep monitors--conceivably--can make the same basic technology a daily part of life, the company hopes.
The Baby Monitor has already received FDA approval and is expected to hit store shelves in the United States toward the fourth quarter, priced at around $200. The company will begin conducting FDA tests on SleepMinder toward the middle of the year.
Later, BiancaMed hopes to insert its motion sensors into wristwatches and turn them into heart monitors.
CORK, Ireland--A radiation detector initially created to protect orbiting satellites has found a new purpose inside cancer patients.
The Tyndall National Institute--a scientific research institute and graduate school in Cork, Ireland--has come up with a radiation detector that fits inside an implantable medical device that measures how well radiation therapy is working. The FDA approved the use of the DVS (Dose Verification System) from North Carolina's Sicel Technologies last August for breast cancer and prostate cancer patients, said Brendan O'Neill, head of the central fabrication facility at Tyndall.
The DVS collects information about patients and then transmits the data to an outside system. It also gets its power externally via its antenna. The device is designed to last as long as the treatment. Two detectors go into each DVS, said O'Neill. Sicel also makes an external version that is applied to the skin, called OneDose, that measures radiation from the most immediate dose of radiation.
The radiation detector module was originally created for the European Space Agency (ESA) to protect satellites from radiation, said O'Neill. The aerospace market, however, consists of only a few big customers so Tyndall decided to refashion its chips, reduce the size, and cut the costs to fit into another market.
It's part of an effort by the Irish government to create a homegrown tech industry. For the past few decades, multinational companies such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft have come to the country to take advantage of a low 12.5 percent corporate percent tax rate. That's far lower than the usual E.U. tax rate, which can range in the 30 percent range, according to Gerard O'Brien, senior development adviser for Enterprise Ireland, a government organization charged with building local industries.
Initially, the multinationals primarily built fabrication and assembly facilities, but over the years have begun to increasingly locate design centers, research labs, European headquarters, and other so-called higher value facilities.
But the rapid evolution of the tech industry in Asia prompted a change in tech policy about five years ago. Now, the government is actively trying to get entrepreneurs to form indigenous start-ups and is priming the process by funding research, investing in venture funds that will invest in Irish companies, and trying to encourage more tech education. Tyndall, for instance, was created in 2004 out of an earlier organization, and one of its primary goals revolves around commercializing laboratory research locked inside the nation's universities and technical institutes. (The other major goal revolves around producing more PhDs, who the government hopes will stay in the country.)
The effort is in the early stages and the results of these programs likely won't be known for a while. "We haven't seen a high level of activity yet, but it has only been five years that we have been pumping money into research at this scale," said Michael Grufferty, the director of industry and innovation at Tyndall.
Still, there have been a few interesting things cropping up. Last year, Motorola invested in Anam, which has created an application for conducting money transfers via cell phones over international borders. It is targeted at the growing immigrant community here. Galway's Porto Media, meanwhile, is coming out with a kiosk that lets you download movies onto a flash memory key. (In the biggest tech deal here in a while, Ireland's Airtricity, which specializes in wind power, got bought by a Scottish utility for over $1 billion earlier this year.)
Other interesting projects at Tyndall:
• Paul Galvin is working on a handheld microelectricalmechanical system that can rapidly scan a person's DNA for susceptibility to different diseases.
• An array of silicon micro-needles that can penetrate a person's skin, but not hit the nerves. The result is, ideally, painless shots.
• High frequency diodes that will be used on the ESA's mission to study the planet Mercury in 2013. It may be possible to integrate cheaper, similar versions of these diodes into solar panels, according to Donagh O'Mahony, a research scientist at Tyndall.
It's not the amount that counts--it's the first few milliliters.
That's the word from Helen Lee, an associate professor at the University of Cambridge, who invented the FirstBurst, that device you see in her hands. It captures the first part of a male patient's urine sample and seals it off into a tube. Those initial milliliters are the ones doctors need for testing. Lee hopes to see the device get shipped into emerging markets to help health professionals. (She has also invented a device for rapidly testing for chlamydia.)
Helen Lee and the FirstBurst
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)The FirstBurst testing has been fairly rigorous. Her group has set up a simulated bladder in a lab that can hold about as much liquid as someone who drank seven beers. Lee has also conducted tests at a local pub. They set up a curtain and asked for volunteers. You need to do real life testing, after all, she said.
"It doesn't matter if you are left handed or right handed," she said. "One of the real surprises has been that men have just as many problems with aim as women do."
Lee was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive and award and met Prince Philip, who had a number of questions too, particularly about the direction for approaching the device. No word on if he actually tested it.
Lee, who has also started a company called Diagnostics for the Real World to help commercialize the device, was in San Jose, Calif., this week to receive an award from the Tech Museum of Innovation.
The FirstBurst (the name just sort of came up in a conversation once and stuck) can't be used to avoid stops on a road trip, she emphasized. It only catches the first few milliliters. It's a question she gets a lot.
Hair plugs. It's a topic no one wants to talk about. Getting hair plugs is a sign of vanity. Besides, what if, instead of using spare arm or leg hair, they plant those crinkly, thick hairs from your big toe onto your head?
Restoration Robotics can't help with that problem, but it will help with the actual planting. The company has created a robot that assists doctors in this part of the operation. Now, doctors put in the hair plugs by hand, just like rice farmers. These robots can save time, money, etc.
A less desirable alternative
(Credit: Party Domain)The company has also just raised $25 million in a second round of financing, according to VentureWire (subscription required). The company will use the money to conduct clinical trials and move to market. Earlier, it raised $11 million. Despite all the money, the company is still somewhat secretive.
"You have Rogaine and Propecia, but those don't give you the same effect, or there's the comb-over," CEO Jim McCollum told VentureWire. Hey, Jim, what about the cinnamon roll? You forgot that hairdo.
Medical devices are getting big and venture money has been streaming in. Israel, which has a large number of doctors and engineers, has been a hot market. Hair removal and cellulite sculpting company Syneron Medical had a successful IPO a few years back.
The U.S. is seeing a surge too. Recently, Satiety raised $30 million for a in-patient stomach stapling device. Normally, doctors have to perform surgery on obese patients to staple stomachs. Cellutions, for cellulite sculpting (not like ice sculptures, more to smooth it out) raised $7 million this summer.
Toga...toga.
If you hear someone chanting that in a hospital, they probably aren't repeating dialogue from Animal House. They are asking for the latest in obesity technology.
Satiety, which has created the TOGa procedure for stapling a stomach without surgery, has raised $30 million in a fourth round of funding. Investors included Skyline Ventures, HLM Venture Partners and Venrock.
"We have been watching the obesity device space for a number of years and finally found an investment that we found compelling," said John Freund of Skyline in a prepared statement.
The TOGa procedure is intended to be far less invasive than current techniques for stomach stapling, which help curb appetites by reducing the size of a person's stomach. With TOGa, a device is slipped down a patient's throat, thereby reducing the recovery time and potential for complications. Surveys show that surgery prompts many patients to decline to undergo full treatment.
Approximately 22 million adults in the U.S. are considered morbidly obese, according to Satiety, and another 50 million are obese, making obesity a major health concern.
TOGa is in the investigation stage and hasn't been approved yet for actual use yet.
Not everyone hates cellulite. Venture capitalists and medical device entrepreneurs like it.
Cellutions has raised $7 million from Versant Ventures, SV Life Sciences, Accuitive Medical Ventures and Carlyle Venture Partners to help it fund human testing for a medical device that smoothes out that lumpy cellulite skin texture that some people get, according to VentureWire.
The machine produced by Cellutions costs $69,000. Doctors buy it, and patients generally have to pay for this kind of aesthetic treatment out of pocket. Paying for treatment yourself, of course, means that if a doctor says "I have a Cellu-tion for you" you can punch him out. You don't have to worry about the insurance company getting testy about that.
Medical devices, in general, are one of the fastest growing segments in venture capital.
Cellutions has not fully fleshed out how its technology, which it licenses from an institution, works. But another company, Israel's Syneron Medical, already has a skin smoothing device on the market and explained it to us last year. A high-powered light source combined with radio frequency energy melt the fat and sort of move it around. This eliminates the unsightly bumps, says founder Shimon Eckhouse. You can also use it to smooth out your skin after getting liposuction. There's lots of extra skin after that. Have you eaten lunch yet?
It doesn't eliminate the fat, Eckhouse added. The company has to figure out a way to get the fat out of your bloodstream before it does that. The energy source for Syneron's VelaSmooth system, which the company has demoed on daytime TV, comes from a system Eckhouse developed for stripping paint off of fighter jets.
Cellutions' system likely doesn't suck out fat either. The company admitted that the treatment, which will cost around $2,500 a pop, only lasts about a year before you have to go back in for another treatment. But while you're there you can get your back hair trimmed again.
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