Medical tools

A research project in Europe is bringing together a multidisciplinary team to create a robot, wearable smart sensor system, and alarm-and-reporting system in the hopes that together they'll enable more elderly people to live independently for longer.

Researchers at the University of the West of England at Bristol (UWE) plan to work with companies such as Robosoft out of France and Smart Homes out of the Netherlands to investigate the best technologies to meet the unique needs of elderly people living alone at home.

Various oft-independent systems, such as health reporting, home alarms, voice-recognition shopping, and nutritional/medication schedules, … Read more

Researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Pennsylvania say they are the first to demonstrate a flexible silicon electronics device for a medical application.

Unveiled in the cover story of the journal Science Translational Medicine this week, the device not only bends, twists, and stretches, but it also produces high-density maps of a heart's electrical activity, an accomplishment that improves on conventional cardiac monitoring technology and could treat arrhythmia, the researchers say.

"The heart is dynamic and not flat, but electronics currently used for monitoring are flat and rigid," says … Read more

German company Retinal Implant on Wednesday unveiled preliminary, yet quite promising, results from a four-year study of 11 patients who underwent retinal-implant surgery after losing their sight due to retinitis pigmentosa.

The company's implants were not the first artificial retina surgically inserted into human patients, and other studies have shown that implants can help a blind person see light and the outlines of objects, the company acknowledges.

But Retinal Implant's clinical trial, it said, gave all 11 patients the ability to see well enough to read or recognize foreign objects. One patient was so thrilled with the results, … Read more

For those who question whether handshakes can heal, here's a piece of literal evidence.

Shaking hands with a robotic arm could help stroke patients re-learn how to use their hands, arms, and even shoulders, according to researchers whose pilot trial results appear in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation.

The idea is for patients to try to guide the robot, nicknamed "Braccio di Ferro" (Iron Arm, also the Italian's name for Popeye), in a figure-eight motion above a desk. The arm pulls if they are moving in the correct direction and resists if they are moving … Read more

For years, people with broken bones have had to suffer through not only the pain of the break, but also the long process of healing, often with the help of titanium screws. Typically, patients must then undergo more surgery to remove the titanium.

When my mom broke her knee in the '90s, they rigged her with so many screws and bars that her X-rays looked more robot than human. She predicted rain with eerie accuracy.

This month, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research (IFAM) in Bremen, Germany, are unveiling a new type of screw … Read more

To determine if there is cancer in one's lymph nodes, a typically advanced stage requiring more aggressive treatment, pathologists are stuck performing several specific, detailed tests that may or may not target the cancerous cells. Using the needle-in-a-haystack analogy would be apt.

But thanks to the work of researchers at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a technique using photoacoustics could scan a lymph node biopsy with laser pulses, whereby the pigment of melanin reacts to the laser's beam, absorbing the light, and heating and cooling (read: expanding and contracting) rapidly. This produces a popping sound that's … Read more

It was horrible to imagine. A Belgian man, uncommunicative since a car accident left him paralyzed in 1983, suddenly seemed to have a message to convey last November with the help of a speech therapist. He was not unconscious, he indicated. He was trapped.

Now, neurologist Steven Laureys, one of Rom Houben's doctors who diagnosed the patient as conscious based on bedside tests performed four years ago, is telling reporters the speech therapist got it wrong. While recent brain scans of Houben do show brain activity and even consciousness, Houben is not communicating, Laureys says.

"We did not … Read more

If you're someone who's never had to deal with sleep apnea, as I am, it may come as a surprise to learn that the most effective--and frequently prescribed--device to treat the disorder, CPAP, is an enormous, unwieldy in-the-vein-of-a-bad-Halloween-costume mask that tends to find its way to such places as the closet, waste basket, or list of inventions to improve before you die.

So it is with great relief that I, even with my lack of sleep apnea, have been tipped off to a new technique currently being tested in Belgium that, if effective, could do wonders for those whose health can seriously suffer from sleep apnea.

ImThera, a privately funded start-up, has developed a tiny neurostimulator surgically implanted near the tongue that is programmed to essentially keep parts of the tongue awake enough to not block one's airway at rest.

Called Targeted Hypoglossal Neurostimulation (THN) Sleep Therapy, the technique consists of a small electrical device implanted under the skin near the lower jaw and along the Hypoglossal (12th cranial) nerve, then connected to a programmable implantable pulse generator (IPG) implanted near the surface of one's upper chest. … Read more

An engineering professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia is developing an acoustic resonant sensor smaller than a human hair to test bodily fluids for a variety of diseases, including breast and prostate cancers.

The real-time sensor uses micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (M/NEMS) to detect diseases in bodily fluids, and can be integrated with small circuits instead of bulky data-reading and analyzing equipment.

Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, won a $400,000, five-year National Science Foundation Career Award in January of 2009 to continue his sensor research.

"Many disease-related substances in liquids are … Read more