Medical Technology News From Around The World
Medgadget is an independent journal of the latest medical gadgets, technologies and discoveries.
Our website is written and published by a group of medical doctors and biomed engineers.
Spider webs are commonly known as a frustration when cleaning the house, or as a source of anger when walking into one while hiking or camping. However, thanks to researchers at University of Akron they may now be associated with a more positive, biomedical application: sutures with embeddable drugs for wound healing.
Writing in a recent issue of Langmuir, the researchers describe employing…
HC1.com is a newly launched cloud based service from Bostech designed to streamline the relationship between medical laboratories and healthcare providers. hc1.com combines comprehensive healthcare CRM, real-time dashboards and alerts, and secure messaging capabilities, all in a browser-based environment. The company believes that its new offering, with no up-front capital investment and no IT infrastructure to maintain, will disrupt the industry by appealing to a wide range of clients.
Shiv Gaglani, Medgadget: In a nutshell, what does hc1 do and how will it change medicine?
In this short talk from TEDxMaastricht, Singularity University faculty member Lucien Engelen discusses how technologies are enabling us to crowdsource our health. He begins by describing the Withings blood pressure monitor and scale, which he uses to record his weight and then publicly share it via Twitter to get positive reinforcement for healthy lifestyle behaviors. He then describes his team’s work on AED4.us, a tool that crowdsources the mapping of all AEDs in a city (a similar app, MyHeartMap, was developed by a team of UPenn computer scientists and emergency physicians).
Check it out for yourself below:
What do you get when two behemoth technology companies with interests in healthcare join forces? Apparently a 750-person healthcare IT company based in Seattle, WAÂ that, according to the press release, aims to drive “a paradigm shift in the delivery of care by enabling health systems and professionals to use real-time, systemwide intelligence to improve healthcare quality and the patient experience.”
The partnership between Microsoft and GE is called Caradigm and has the healthcare IT industry buzzing. Both companies will be contributing intellectual property to the 50-50 venture, including:
TEDMED may be the most exhilarating medical innovation and technology conference on the planet. Anyone who has seen one of the talks – from the fluorescent future of surgery to the art and science of tissue printing – or read Medgadget‘s exciting coverage (we may be slightly biased) has likely dreamed of attending the actual event. Well, thanks to a new program offered by TEDMED, here’s your chance!
The recently announced TEDMED Front-Line Scholarships Program will award $2 million in financial support to qualified applicants to attend TEDMED 2012 in Washington DC from April 10 – 13. Once you submit your application for either a half- or full-scholarship (to cover the registration fee of $4,950), you can expect to hear back within ten business days.
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We are only two months into 2012 and it’s clear that the Quantified Self movement is increasingly gaining traction. More devices are emerging to help people quantify everything from anxiety to weight, and blood glucose to sleep patterns. But what about people who cannot use the devices or are not ambulatory themselves?
A team led by Professor Bruce MacDonald at the University of Auckland in New Zealand has been working to create a corp of medical robots – Healthbots – to help these people. Medgadget had the opportunity to interview Professor MacDonald about the Healthbots, what they do, and when we can expect to see them available to help those in need.
Given all of the recent media buzz surrounding Facebook – the Emperor of all Social Networks – we at Medgadget wanted to reflect some of that light onto the social networks that are most influencing medicine today. One such network is QuantiaMD, whose membership exceeds 150,000 physicians, according to the company, or one in five in the US!
We have previously covered two apps developed by the company: DiabetesIQ and Pri-Med. This editor first met up with QuantiaMD’s CEO, Eric Schultz, and Chief Communications Officer, Mary Modahl, at the mHealth Summit and just touched base again to produce the interview below.
Ever since the Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram developed his eponymous test (the Gram stain) in 1882 to differentiate between types of bacteria, diagnostic tests have been integral to both public and individual health. The ability to rapidly and accurately detect microbes is becoming increasingly important given the emergence of diverse drug resistant strains, such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA; Gram positive bacteria resembling purple grapes), as well as the length of time it currently takes to diagnose and treat certain infections (e.g. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which cannot be detected via Gram stain but rather an acid-fast stain, has an incredibly slow doubling time which is why it can take weeks to accurately diagnose tuberculosis). In recent years genomic technologies have fortunately opened the doors for faster and more accurate detection of microbes than petri dish cultures and chemical staining can provide. Medgadget had the opportunity to interview two partner companies – PathoGenetix and Sagentia – that are developing a state-of-the-art Genome Sequence Scanning (GSS) technology, which promises to bring rapid microbial detection to the fields of microbial genomics research, food and product safety, and clinical infectious disease testing.
Shiv Gaglani, Medgadget: How many micro-organisms can be detected through the partnership technology?
André Romelle Young may just earn his self-given stage name, Dr. Dre, thanks to the innovative work of Purdue University researchers. The team discovered that acoustic waves from music, especially rap with its emphasis on bass, could be useful as power sources for implantable medical devices.
Their proof of concept was a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) capable of sensing pressure. The press release describes how the sensor operates and is charged:
The Medical Revolution Will Be Blogged.
Medgadget is an independent journal of the latest medical gadgets, technologies and discoveries.
Our website is written, edited and published by a group of MDs and biomed engineers.
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