Philips Respironics Announces the SimplyGo Oxygen Concentrator

Philips Respironics Announces the SimplyGo Oxygen Concentrator

Having to live with an external oxygen source is no fun for people with COPD. The patients who require supplemental oxygen often are tethered to a heavy gas tank or an almost as heavy oxygen concentrator.  There are portable concentrators on the market, but the lightweight ones designed for travel usually only offer pulsed oxygen delivery, effectively leaving a lot of people left with heavier devices that have to be wheeled around.

Philips Respironics has developed the SimplyGo highly portable oxygen concentrator that weighs ten pounds (4.5 Kg) and offers both pulsed and continuous oxygen delivery.  This means that almost anyone requiring external oxygen can go fishing with the nephew instead of being stuck at home.  Just don’t get the oxygen delivery tube tangled around the fishing line.

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BrailleTouch: Touchscreen Typing App for the Visually Impaired

BrailleTouch: Touchscreen Typing App for the Visually Impaired

Touchscreens lack buttons, making it very difficult for blind or visually impaired people to use smartphones and tablets. That is what Mario Romero, postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, probably thought when he came up with the idea to develop BrailleTouch, an app that allows folks to type on the touchscreen without seeing it at all.

The application works by putting the 6 dots of a braille character on the screen in landscape mode with 3 on each side. Three fingers from each hand then press in the appropriate patterns to create the desired characters. There is audio feedback to confirm the correct input and the screen flips regardless of orientation so a user does not have to worry about the phone being “upside-down.”

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Elekta Clarity with Autoscan for Robotic Ultrasound Visualization During Radiation Therapy

Elekta Clarity with Autoscan for Robotic Ultrasound Visualization During Radiation Therapy

Elekta, a Swedish firm, received FDA 510(k) clearance for its Clarity soft tissue visualization system with the Autoscan option.

The ultrasound system can now be used to automatically scan the prostate and surrounding anatomy from a control room during radiation therapy, providing live precision targeting without the unnecessary exposure of patients and clinicians to ionizing radiation.

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Medtronic Resolute Integrity DES Cleared in the U.S.

Medtronic Resolute Integrity DES Cleared in the U.S.

Medtronic‘s Resolute Integrity drug eluting stent has been cleared by the FDA for treatment of coronary artery disease.  The device is built on the platform of the Integrity bare metal stent that uses a wire that is specially bent and wound like a helix to create a spring-like structure.

The device was approved in Europe about a year and a half ago.

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New Assay on AcuStar Hemostasis Testing System Receives CE Mark

New Assay on AcuStar Hemostasis Testing System Receives CE Mark

Instrumentation Laboratory (IL), Bedford, MA, announced the release of their new HemosIL AcuStar HIT Panel assay that is also now a European CE IVD Marked product.The ACL AcuStar is a fully automated device for chemiluminescent testing in the hemostasis laboratory. Ready to use cartridges with reagents can be kept stable up to six weeks refrigerated at 4°C onboard. One test takes around 30 minutes and one rack accommodates 30 samples, so 60 results can be produced per hour.

The system comes with an easy to use touchscreen and runs on a Windows interface. Several hemostasis assays are already available on the ACL AcuStar like D-Dimer testing and an Anti-phospholipids panel for diagnosis of Antiphospohlipid syndrome (APS).

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Children’s Hospital Boston’s Innovation Day Showcases Local MedTech

Children's Hospital Boston's Innovation Day Showcases Local MedTech

Last week, the researchers and clinicians in residence at Children’s Hospital Boston gathered under the auspices of the Innovation Acceleration Program at CHB for an afternoon of “TED-like” talks and demos. Since we mentioned it here, it was only appropriate that we go to check it out. If you want to watch the whole afternoon of talks, the recording has been posted online. (For a really good discussion of what it takes for a clinician to bring an innovation from idea to practice, watch Dr. Pedro del Nido’s talk at the 2 hr mark).

The point of the sessions was to promote collaboration between the relatively autonomous clinical and research departments at CHB, and pitch the innovation grants available to clinicians and researchers at the institution. Dr. Joseph Madsen MD, one of the recipients of the grants, explained that small innovation grants, which don’t require a lot of preliminary data or extensive applications, are helpful in exploring ideas that otherwise would not have been pursued. Another theme of the talks was that, from an institutional perspective, a great way to support innovation from within is to have a place where innovators can bring napkin-drawing level ideas to establish time of invention and the institutional know how to connect the napkin artist to people who can bring the idea to the world. Two ideas that followed that path were a head wrap for re-warming babies during cardiac surgery thought up by nurse Karen Sakakeeny and an implantable kidney dialysis unit that will be undergoing clinical trials soon originated by Hiep T. Nguyen, MD.

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Agilent Unveils DNA Methylation Target Enrichment System

Agilent Unveils DNA Methylation Target Enrichment System

The SureSelect XT Human Methyl-Seq System was presented by Agilent Technologies last week at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Florida. The Agilent SureSelect XT Methyl-Seq is the first comprehensive DNA methylation discovery system that uses target enrichment.

It enables researchers to analyze more than 3.7 million individual CpG (Cytosine-phosphate-Guanine) sites for their methylation state. Agilent states that the SureSelect XT Human Methyl-Seq System delivers higher throughput and lower costs than whole genome bisulfate sequencing.

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ReCor PARADISE Percutaneous Renal Denervation System Receives CE Mark

ReCor PARADISE Percutaneous Renal Denervation System Receives CE Mark

ReCor Medical has received CE mark for its PARADISE (Percutaneous Renal Denervation System) ultrasound platform for renal denervation. The PARADISE is designed to treat patients with resistant hypertension. It does this by reducing sympathetic nervous system hyperactivity by denervating sympathetic nerves in the renal artery walls, which may be the primary mechanism by which the kidneys contribute to systemic hypertension.

PARADISE includes a 6 French-compatible catheter with a cylindrical transducer that emits ultrasound energy circumferentially, allowing for a rapid and highly efficient renal denervation procedure. The advantage of PARADISE is its ability to uniformly denervate all the way around the arterial wall while simultaneously cooling the endothelium, to help enable a safe, consistent, and fast renal denervation procedure.

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Lego Prosthethic Arm Takes Custom Prostheses to a Whole New (Fun) Level

Lego Prosthethic Arm Takes Custom Prostheses to a Whole New (Fun) Level

Lego is an attractive tool for biomedical engineers and scientists looking to create low cost custom mounts for their imaging equipment or looking to prototype novel prosthetic devices. We have covered a number of useful Lego medgadgets over the years, however few have been as complex as a new Lego prosthetic arm developed by engineering student Max Shepherd.

Max developed and built the 12 degree of freedom prosthetic arm from Lego components as a means to accurately mimic the full range of motion of a normal human arm and hand. The hand movements are powered using Lego pneumatics while the wrist pronation/supination, wrist flexion/extension, and elbow flexion/extension are powered by Lego motors.

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