What does a hospital do when it needs to conduct major renovations while continuing to be able to conduct surgeries? Turns out one company makes mobile surgery trucks that offer a complete surgical theater and can be setup in an hour by just a couple of people.

The Miami VA Medical Center is actually using five of these Mobile Surgical Units from MMIC (Mobile Medical International Corporation) to continue operating on patients without missing a beat.  Of course, these are also useful in disaster relief and for military operations.

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The 104-year old R&D research arm recently released a video of its glass-filled vision for the next 104 years. Some of the concepts presented are already in development, but one intriguing section in the middle of the video visualizes the use of Corning glass in the medical lab. We’ll start you off at the 3:07 mark and you’ll see glass used in futuristic, transparent medical terminals and tablets. You’ll also see glass (which is antimicrobial) used in a holographic examination table integrated with a cool-looking MRI scanner.

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KRAIBURG TPE, a maker of thermoplastic elastomers based on HSBC (hydrogenated styrene block copolymers) out of Waldkraiburg, Germany, has released a new surface material that promises much greater grip during dry and wet conditions than conventional thermoplastic elastomers.

Not having to use tackifiers, chemical compounds that provide extra grip but make the surface feel sticky and tacky, can be a benefit for all sorts of medical devices where precision control is important.

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We’re all familiar with the 3D glasses by now. But now the 3D technology is also going to be uses to teach medical students about the anatomy of the human body. At the New York University School of Medicine, students now can navigate through a virtual body using a computer and 3D glasses. They can dissect the virtual body, which is projected on a screen.

The virtual human body is made possible by BioDigital Systems, a medical visualization company from Manhattan that we have covered before. BioDigital makes anatomical animations for all kinds of companies and institutions, such as pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers and medical schools.

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If you’re noticing that your 20-hour Skyrim gaming marathons are causing you to lose muscle definition, you might want to check out Advancer Technologies‘ “USB Biofeedback Game Controller.” It’s a DIY project based on our favorite Arduino microcontroller and contains electromyography circuit boards to detect electrical activity in muscles. The kit comes with four muscle sensors that can each be programmed to control four buttons. For example, squeezing your hand could trigger the button to make a character move, and flexing your bicep could cause the character to jump.

It’s probably the nerdiest way to show off the power of your guns (and the strangest way to control Mario), but it’s certainly an interesting and offbeat use of electromyography!

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The daily activities of the modern hospital are increasingly automated and computer-controlled.  While the benefits in terms of preventing medication errors are attractive, an unwanted side effect is the proliferation of competing, often incompatible systems.  When you have several systems and databases in each hospital (medical records, order entry, medication list, medication orders, medication administration records, etc.), each of which are proprietary and don’t communicate with each other, the technology becomes cumbersome and leads to decreased efficiency and increased staff frustration.

CareFusion, maker of the ubiquitous Pyxis medication dispensing system, is trying to address this problem with the Pyxis ES platform.  One of the key features of this new system is that it seeks to integrate many hospital systems, touting increased integration with pharmacy information systems and allowing access at the web-browser level for ease of support.  Other upgrades include a new user interface that provides more information about the patient at the point of care, and safety features such as highlighting patients with the same name to avoid giving that medication to the wrong John Smith.

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Freescale Semiconductor out of Austin, Texas introduced a home health hub (HHH) reference platform to help medical equipment manufacturers create remote-access devices that can collect, connect and securely share health data.

The home health hub (HHH) reference platform is designed to speed and ease development for emerging telehealth applications using seamless connectivity and data aggregation to provide remote access and healthcare management. At least, that’s what the company hopes. Its technology provides multiple connectivity options to obtain data from commercially available wired and wireless healthcare devices such as blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, weight scales, blood glucose monitors, etc. The reference platform incorporates broad capabilities so that design engineers have flexibility in their next generation remote monitoring designs.

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Here’s an interesting product known as Cardio Simulator. CrossMedical, based out of Japan, has developed a method to create remarkably precise replicas of the heart using soft materials that reproduce an individual’s heart based on CT data sets.

Using laser fabrication and an epoxy resin a soft detailed model can be created. The company provides pre-made standard adults models or, for a price, one can custom design a model based on CT imaging of a particular patient.  The technology can be used as an educational tool or as part of a pre-op assessment for surgeons to determine which approach is best for the patient, particularly when dealing with congenitally malformed hearts. More information on the process can be found on their website.

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Plasma is hot: a few weeks ago we reported about a new atmospheric plasma technology to create sealed plastic bags which are suitable for cell culture. Now a research group headed by David Graves from the University of Berkeley, California has shown that ionized plasma does not only sterilize water, but can make it antimicrobial as well. They will report their findings this month in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics

Graves and his colleagues report that the water treated with plasma killed all the E.coli bacteria that were put into it within a few hours, and after seven days the water continued to kill 99.9% of the bacteria put into it at that time. Interestingly, they also showed that plasma can get rid of dangerous proteins and lipids like prions that standard sterilization processes leave behind.

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It’s pretty much common knowledge, and indeed the science proves it, that a good night’s sleep has profound effects on your overall health. We’ve reviewed a lot of cool gadgets here at Medgadget that help you diagnose your sleep, but what’s the next step?

Select Comfort, a company you’ve probably seen on numerous ads and in your local shopping mall, has an innovative solution for all your restless nights – a mattress. Select Comfort‘s is no ordinary mattress; it’s a specially made, air-filled mattress that features adjustable firmness regulated by how much air is inside of it. Prefer a mattress so firm you can bounce spare change off of it? Press a button to change the firmness to your desired setting (known as your “sleep number”), and the mattress quietly fills with air.

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