There seems to be a lot of medgadgetry being used in this year’s Olympics. The latest mystery has been the black pattern on America’s beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh’s shoulder. The bookofjoe blog had a crack research team investigate the matter, and they’ve apparently discovered that the stuff is Kinesiotape, the manufacturer of which claims it has the ability to “re-educate the neuromuscular system, promote lymphatic flow, reduce pain, enhance performance, prevent injury, and promote injury resolution.” Turns out the tape is used by a few other Olympians, and Kinesio has a page showing off its product at the games: Kinesio @ the Olympics…
More at bookofjoe…
Product page: Kinesio® Tex…
Sports Medicine Archives
Medgadget Olympics Continue With Kinesio
A Slam-Dunk Design for a Wheelchair
When they were students at the University of Illinois, Ricky Biddle, Eric Larson and Ben Shao decided to do something for the disabled athletes involved in wheelchair basketball. This sport is inherently dangerous, and injuries resulting from collisions are frequent. The other intrinsic problem is the need for participants to use hands not only to dribble the ball but to control the wheelchair. So the three chaps teamed up with Austin Cliffe, another designer, and have come up with a prototype Balance Sport Wheelchair, now Gold winner of the 2008 International Design Excellence Award in Medical & Scientific Concepts category.
Ricky Biddle gave us the following explanation:
Real Exercise for a Virtual World
A couple Dutch tinkerers, with the understanding that many of us already live in Second Life, spliced an exercise bike with a computer. The system now allows a user to control an avatar while getting some real life exercise at the same time.
From the project page:
Tanita Body Composition Monitor
An interesting personal scale, if it can be called in such a limited way, has been put to our attention as a nifty present for the health conscious and gadget obsessed man in your family. The device claims to provide accurate muscle mass and body fat numbers for each arm and leg, in addition to the body on the whole. And these and other numbers can be tracked via a graph screen on the top of the unit.
Our new father is planning to review the device hands on (feet on?) in the coming days to see if one needs to know Fortran to operate this thing.
Slimstick Exercise Companion from Seiko
Seiko has created what seems to be a tiny pedometer-like device that can supposedly calculate one’s calories burned during a workout routine. The Slimstick features a built-in accelerometer, and algorithms that use its information, along with input from the user, to calculate one’s exertion in real-time.
Google translation of Slimstick info page…
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VitalJacket: Heart Monitoring Shirt
In an attempt to make heart monitoring less visible and bulky for individuals requiring continuous monitoring of their heart, BioDevices, SA, has a unique solution. The company has developed a T-shirt which continuously monitors heart rate and ECG waves. This is an ideal solution for elderly patients and has a lot of potential for fitness applications as well.
The Vital Jacket® is a wearable vital signs monitoring system that joins textiles with microelectronics. It was designed and developed to be a usable pragmatic approach for different clinical and normal life scenarios, in hospitals, home or on the move, that need continuous or frequent high quality vital signs monitoring from the patient or healthy subject. The concept was designed and specified based on the long tradition on biomedical instrumentation and telemedicine of the IEETA institute of the University of Aveiro, Portugal (www.ieeta.pt/sias).
Femtosecond Lazers: Killing Cancer & Fusing Metal to Bone
University of Missouri scientists are working to bring functional femtosecond lasers [as in beams] out of the real of sci-fi and into the real world of medicine. Lead researcher, and professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Robert Tzou explains how this new technology could revolutionize everything from dentistry to oncology to joint replacement surgery.
What makes the femtosecond laser different from other lasers is its unique capacity to interact with its target without transferring heat to the area surrounding its mark. The intensity of the power gets the job done while the speed ensures heat does not spread. Results are clean cuts, strong welds and precision destruction of very small targets, such as cancer cells, with no injury to surrounding materials. Tzou hopes that the laser would essentially eliminate the need for harmful chemical therapy used in cancer treatments.
RespiShirt Respiratory Assistant
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering in Germany developed an innovative system to monitor the respiratory status in patients suffering from a variety of cardiac and pulmonary conditions. The technology is designed to guide and optimize lifestyles of patients:
The digital assistant acts as a navigation device and tells the cyclists about places of interest with the aid of video clips. More than anything, however, it takes care of the person’s health needs, as ISST project manager Thomas Königsmann reports: “The PDA suggests suitable tours and monitors the patient’s respiration values during the bicycle tour.” In the evening, the doctor can check out the data and get an idea of how the patient’s health is progressing. If necessary, he or she can adjust the medication dosage on the basis of the data obtained.
G-Trainer Weight Reducing Treadmill Approved as Medgadget by FDA
G-Trainer antigravity treadmill, from Menlo Park, CA based Alter-G, Inc., is now classified as a medical device, cleared by the FDA “for medical uses in rehabilitation after lower extremity injury or surgery, aerobic conditioning, weight control, gait training for neurological conditions, and strengthening and conditioning for older patients,” according to the company’s press release.
The device has more features than the computer in front of you, namely “an advanced air pressure regulation system, enclosure sealing component, a customized treadmill, and a touch screen control panel.”
