Health tech

X Fingers prosthetic designed to replace lost digits

More lifelike, functional prosthetics for lost fingers may soon be more readily available as mechanical digits known as X Fingers are set to be mass-produced within six months, according to inventor Dan Didrick.

X Fingers are fashioned out of surgical steel and bend naturally with the movement of residual fingers. They're simple, lightweight, body-powered, and don't require any electronics or electricity.

The removable devices can be covered in thermoplastic for a lifelike appearance. Depending on the configuration they're sometimes anchored in a wrist strap.

Florida-based Didrick was motivated in part by a desire to help a hearing-impaired person regain sign language ability after losing fingers. He whittled his first concept prototype out of pine wood.

Then he began using 3D design software to refine his invention. Eight years after initial sketches, hundreds of X Fingers are in use today, and Didrick Medical has also produced X Thumbs.

There seems to be a big demand for these simple devices. Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor data, the company says about 8,000 work-related amputations occur each year involving one or more fingers. … Read more

How to keep hackers away from your pacemaker

With millions of implantable medical devices in the U.S. alone, and some 300,000 more people receiving them worldwide every year, the need to protect these wireless devices from being hacked is increasingly urgent.

Wearers might soon be better protected, thanks to new work out of MIT and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, so long as they don't mind walking around in invisible shields.

The system the research team will be proposing at the Association for Computing Machinery's Sigcomm conference in Toronto this August uses a jamming transmitter small enough to be worn as a watch or necklace.

The device would essentially be authorized to access the implant and send encrypted instructions to the transmitter (the team calls this the "shield"), which would in turn decode the encryption and relay the instructions to the implant.

Using a device that is separate from the medical implant is key for a few reasons: it allows for post-encryption in devices that are already implanted; it enables authorized emergency responders to simply remove the patient's shield in the event of emergencies; and it doesn't require the size of the implants to increase to accommodate and power the shield.

The new system expands on a technique recently developed at Stanford University that allows for sending and receiving signals in the same frequency band. In typical wireless technology, using the same frequency band interferes with the signal, but by employing three antennas positioned precise distances apart, one band can now be used.… Read more

Chew on this: NutriSmart edible RFID tags

Would you let a man who created a piece of furniture called the "scum chair" anywhere near your food? I would, as long as the man is design engineering student Hannes Harms from the Royal College of Art in London.

Harms has hatched a concept called NutriSmart that melds the tracking power of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags with the yumminess of Twinkies, Cheez Wiz, or just about any other food product you can imagine. The edible tags could hold information about where the food was grown or shipped from, what the ingredients are, how far it has traveled, and what the nutritional content is.

The NutriSmart prototype includes a smart plate that reads the RFID tags in the food. It can tell you how many calories it is costing you (150 for that Twinkie) and how it stacks up nutritionally in your diet.

Harms imagines a kitchen with a smart refrigerator that tells you when your milk is going sour or that it's time to replace that aging bottle of ketchup you haven't touched in a year. It could also be used to alert allergy sufferers when a potentially dangerous ingredient is present. … Read more

Software 'hearing dummies' customize hearing aids

Many of us know at least one person who has a hearing aid that sits on a shelf somewhere, collecting dust. The usual complaint: The thing just doesn't work right.

A professor at the University of Essex in the U.K. says these aren't just excuses, but legitimate complaints. "Today's hearing aids don't help to separate sounds--they just amplify them," said Ray Meddis, who has led work on a new kind of hearing aid. "They often make everything too noisy for the wearer, especially in social situations like parties, and some wearers still can't make out what people are saying to them. They find the whole experience so uncomfortable that they end up taking their hearing aids out," Meddis said in a statement released today.

Meddis and his team at Essex have been working on a new kind of aid they say could revolutionize what is now an antiquated approach to treating hearing impairments. The key, they say, is to use unique computer models (what they call "hearing dummies") that treat the root causes, not just the symptoms, of the user's unique condition.

"In the same way that a tailor's dummy is used to measure and fit a garment for a particular person, our software dummy is used to gauge a patient's hearing requirements so that their hearing aid can then be programmed to suit their needs," Meddis said.… Read more

Kinect hack allows for 'intelligent healing' massage

KINECT + Massage with Flow Field: pt 2 [Towards an Intelligent Healing Space] from Jai.Tronik on Vimeo.

Calling all massage therapists who want to help clients connect to their "energy fields," or who simply need a little stimulation to stay inspired in the middle of a long work day: The Flow Field 2 is here.

New York University grad student Jason Stephens has combined a video projector, Kinect, and OpenKinect Libraries programming tools to follow the massage therapist's "flow field" (aka movements), beaming the output onto the client's body in a colorful guide.

The project, called Intelligent Healing Spaces, points on its home page to a recent Oxford Journal of Rheumatology study excerpt:

There is increasing evidence that drug-free illusion therapies can be beneficial for the amelioration of chronic pain, particularly so for conditions in which some of the pain is thought to have a cortical origin...If cortical misrepresentation of body parts contributes to pain, then manipulating the appearance of those body parts might be a useful tool in the reduction of pain.

Actual therapeutic value has yet to be proven, and the client would require some kind of mirror to be able to see what is going on back there, but either way, at least the massage therapist should be having a good show.… Read more

Paraplegic's post-college gig: Testing bionic legs

Austin Whitney graduated from UC Berkeley just last month, and he already has a full-time job. Whitney works as a human lab rat.

The 22-year-old paraplegic, who captured headlines recently when he walked across the stage at his commencement wearing bionic legs, now spends long days with the engineers who developed the customized robotic suit. He passionately believes in the device and its potential to alter the lives of those with spinal cord injuries, and he wants to do whatever he can to help perfect the prototype--for himself and others like him.

"We want to make the Model T version of an exoskeleton," Whitney told CNET. "There are health benefits to mobility. It's good for the circulatory and muscular systems, and there's a social and mental benefit. Four years ago, I thought I was going to die on a hospital bed."

That was 2007, when Whitney was 18 years old and got into a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

"The spinal cord injury meant I would likely never walk again," he said. But he did, taking his first public steps in four years at a graduation ceremony at Edwards Track Stadium on May 7 (see the video below).

During the nine months prior, however, he had experimented with walking in a custom-fit robotic device developed on campus in the lab of mechanical engineering professor Professor Homayoon Kazerooni, who is also founder of Berkeley Bionics. That company makes the eLegs robotic exoskeleton, which is currently undergoing trials and is expected to become available to rehabilitation centers by the end of the year, with a personal version for sale for an as-yet-undisclosed price in 2013.

A friend who plays wheelchair basketball with Whitney told him about Kazerooni, one of a number of innovators around the world devoted to developing robotic exoskeletons for wheelchair users. After speaking with him on the phone, Whitney decided to visit the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory. "It is like something out of a movie set--exoskeletons hanging from the walls everywhere," he said.

It's inside that lab where Whitney does most of his walking these days, though he does on occasion roam the campus in his bionic suit. He has degrees in history and political science, and plans to attend law school in the fall of 2012. But for now, he spends about six hours a day, from noon to 6 p.m., working (for pay) in the lab. … Read more

Could magnets replace aspirin as blood thinners?

Temple University physics department chair Rongjia Tao made headlines in 2008 when he developed a simple device that creates an electric field to thin fuel, thereby reducing the size of the droplets injected into the engine and improving fuel efficiency.

Now, Tao and former graduate student Ke Huang are unveiling their latest research that this same principle, when applied to the human body, can help thin blood and reduce one's risk of heart attack--without the side effects of blood thinners such as aspirin.

After testing numerous blood samples at Temple, the physicists were able to use a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to what is used in an MRI) for just one minute to polarize the red blood cells, which contain iron, thereby causing those cells to link together in short, streamlined chains flowing down the center of blood vessels and reducing friction along the walls.

The result: smoother blood flow. In fact, after just 1 to 12 minutes of exposure to the magnetic field via a 1,000-pound magnet, blood viscosity decreased by 20 to 30 percent for several hours. Eventually, blood viscosity returned to previous levels.… Read more

EmWave2: Portable stress relief for harried geeks

It can be hard to get a techie to relax. We are often found toiling away at Internet start-ups, programming under pressure, or blasting away at Call of Duty as enemies swarm across the lines.

The new emWave2 stress management system from HeartMath features several components that geeks love: a gadget, a computer program, and lots of cool graphs. It also has 20 years worth of stress research behind its development, but the glowing lights are what first catch your eye.

According to HeartMath, emWave technology is already being used by more than 10,000 health professionals, including 65 Veteran Administration hospitals and clinics for post-traumatic stress disorder treatment. The second-generation emWave2 is designed for personal use and is portable enough to tuck in your pocket. It also adds a computer interface and desktop program that can track your results, and it has several additional applications including a slideshow and a garden game that adds colors and images as you relax.

I got my hands on the emWave2 and took it for a stress-test drive. The $229 kit includes both an ear and a thumb monitor for your heart rate. I used the thumb monitor. It also includes a line of blue lights that give you visual feedback for controlling your breathing.… Read more

Free Amazon App of the Day - 5/29/11

Looking for a really good fitness application for your phone can be a pain in the butt--and exhausting. At which point, you're done trying. The GPS is off by (insert miles here), Facebook integration doesn't work, it has less than a handful of workout scenarios, no customization...

CardioTrainer has been in the top-apps list in the Android Market since the market was first introduced. CNET reviewed the lite version in May 2009, and a lot of bugs have been fixed in those two years--I mean, you'd hope so right?

On Amazon's Appstore for Android you can download the full, ad-free version of the Pro version (typically $9.99) for nothing. Features include auto-mapping, six levels of interval training, 20 levels of difficulty, audio and video feedback during workouts, pedometer, more than 40 different preinstalled workouts to choose from, and a built-in music player. There's a customization setting if your workout isn't in the predefined list.

There is a precursor to installing this app on Amazon, however. You must download and install the free (or lite) version of CardioTrainer first. Once that's done, download and install the Pro version. And there you go! Unlocked, free and fully-featured.

CardioTrainer Pro will be Amazon's free App of the Day until 3 a.m. ET/12 a.m. PT tonight. Try it out. There's always the option of uninstalling if it doesn't suit your needs, and free is free. … Read more

MoodKit: Can an app improve your mood?

Sometimes we all get so wrapped up in our physical health (see: Four killer iPhone apps that help you lose weight), we forget about our mental health. But take it from a guy who can get mighty moody, it's no less important.

MoodKit is a new app packed with tools designed to improve not just your mood, but also your overall well-being. It's available now for $4.99.

Developed by a pair of clinical psychologists, MoodKit employs acknowledged cognitive-therapy techniques. It's designed to be used on its own or as part of a professional treatment plan.

The … Read more