Cellnovo is a London, UK based startup working on an interesting mobile diabetes management system, that is still mostly in stealth mode. 
The company hopes that its technology will make routine diabetics’ tasks and decisions more mobile, intuitive, and socially friendly, by integrating its insulin pump, as well as the touch-screen mobile-connected device, into a social network-like environment.
The investors are also impressed with the technology, as the company has just closed a Series B £30 million ($48.4 million) financing round.
A recent article in IN VIVO: The Business and Medicine Report, describes Cellnovo pump technology as the most accurate to come to the market in years.
To learn more about Cellnovo, here’s a link to the company website…
More: Diabetes management system could be ‘iTunes of diabetes care’ …
Pediatrics Archives
Will Cellnovo Revolutionize Diabetes Management?
New Technique to Non-Invasively Measure Aortic Blood Pressure
For more than a century, physicians have used a sphygmomanometer to measure the systolic and diastolic blood pressure in the brachial artery. The sphygmomanometer has evolved significantly over the past 100 years, but the theory behind measuring this important vital sign has remained unchanged.
While one’s brachial artery is the most common site to measure blood pressure, it it not the most reliable. Younger people, for example, have more compliant blood vessel walls that can give misleadingly high blood pressure. Older people have stiffer blood vessels which could give a misleadingly low blood pressure. In either case, such inaccurate readings can cause clinicians to administer improper meds or drips.
PneumoniaCheck to Help Improve Pneumonia Test Sample Collection
A team of mechanical engineering and bioengineering graduate students at Georgia Tech has developed an innovative device for capturing aerosols originating in the lungs. The common problem in diagnosing pneumonia is that during collection, the sample often gets contaminated by oral bacteria. The PneumoniaCheck takes advantage of air currents to separate particles coming from the lungs from those originating in the mouth so that pulmonary phlegm hits the filter and everything else goes into the balloon below. David Ku, the engineering professor who oversaw the project, says that the PneumoniaCheck “has the potential to save more lives than any other medical device.” To be available for sale later this month, via a spinoff firm MD Innovate, we hope the professor’s comments come true.
The device contains a plastic tube with a mouthpiece. A patient coughs into the device to fill up a balloon-like upper airway reservoir before the lung aerosols go into a filter. Using fluid mechanics, PneumoniaCheck separates the upper airway particles of the mouth from the lower airway particles coming from the lungs.
Siemens Mobile Device Warns of Oncoming Asthma Attacks
Engineers at Siemens have developed a mobile phone sized device that is capable of detecting nitric oxide (NO), an oncoming asthma attack marker, at parts per billion scale. Once the device makes it to the consumer market, asthma patients will be able to take preemptive action and raise their drug dosage levels when an attack looks impending.
The new sensor can detect increases in NO one day before an acute asthma attack occurs. Over the past few years, medical researchers and health insurance companies have recognized that NO levels are an effective indication of an impending asthma attack. In the analysis of a patient’s breath, the system first converts nitrogen monoxide into nitrogen dioxide, after which the air flows across the actual sensor. Only the particles signaling the attack adhere to the sensor’s surface. This generates a voltage that is measured by a field-effect transistor. The intensity of the voltage is directly dependent on the amount of nitrogen monoxide in the patient’s breath. On the basis of this value, the patient can decide what dose of anti-inflammatory medication he or she should take.
Mobisante’s MobiUS Smartphone Ultrasound Receives FDA 510(k) Clearance
Cellphones have come a long way with the rise of the smartphone. What used to be simply a means of making phone calls remotely, now is the way by which we can send emails, text messages, photos, and…acquire fetal images!
You can thank Redmond, Washington-based Mobisante for that last one, because it has announced that its MobiUS ultrasound imaging system has received FDA approval to be marketed in the United States.
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Intravascular Continuous Glucose Monitoring from InvivoSense
We’ve featured continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices on Medgadget before, but they had the disadvantage of being subcutaneous, and it’s unclear how long the subcutaneous reading takes to catch up to the actual blood glucose level.
A new device from InvivoSense, a company based in Norway, is inserted through a central line port and measures, in real-time, the glucose concentration in the blood. This could help us to more accurately study the effect of “tight” vs. “permissive” glucose control. The studies so far on this subject have been contradictory, and part of the reason may be that glucose is normally measured only hourly at the most.
NHS Innovation Hub Shows Off Collapsible Pocket-Sized Spacer
NHS, the trust that runs the UK health service, also apparently has several offices devoted to medical device innovation. One regional office, the Health Enterprise East, today sent out a release promoting the POCKETFLOW Spacer, invented by Paul Watson of Norfolk.
Used with standard asthma inhalers, the POCKETFLOW®Spacer is designed to ensure optimal fluid flow through the chamber and is compact and portable, easy to use and clean and cost-effective to produce. Aimed primarily at the paediatric market, it can also be used by adults as an alternative to large volume spacers when out and about, during sport and when traveling…
A Story of ShuntCheck
Vector blog from Children’s Hospital Boston has an interesting post about ShuntCheck, a device developed by a neurosurgeon uncle of a ten year old Spencer Neff who suffers from hydrocephalus. The device is designed to monitor the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through VP and other cerebral shunts. Since headaches can arise from an increased intracranial pressure above a blocked pathway, a visit to the emergency room was required every time a serious headache kicked in. The goal of a new device is to provide instant status check so that appropriate action can be taken earlier.
Read on from Vector:
Speech Buddies Put The R in Pronunciation
If your child’s speech sounds like Elmer Fudd while on a rabbit hunt or Tweety Bird that just saw a pussy cat, Speech Buddies from Articulate Technologies may help. The plastic devices that look like toothbrushes are designed to be manipulated in specific ways by the tongue while pronouncing letters and words that need working on.
Here’s a demonstration of how to use a Speech Buddy:
