Although the medical tricorder will remain a dream to be chased by digital health innovators for the years to come, I collected the portable, digital health diagnostic devices currently on the market in case anyone is thinking about purchasing an effective gadget making the patient the point of care. Chasing the dream of the medical...
Category: <span>Devices</span>
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Google alert helps to end a former Royal Marine’s 10-year tinnitus hell: Notification highlighted pioneering IPOD-based therapy that has allowed veteran to ‘function again as a human being’
Harris Tatakis suffered the debilitating condition after 2007 bomb in Afghanistan The blast left the 39-year-old with ruptured eardrums and brain damage Since then he has had ringing in his ears so loud it caused him hearing problems He is believed to be the first UK veteran to benefit from the therapy A former Royal...
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Butterfly iQ, a Whole Body Ultrasound That Fits in a Pocket
Butterfly Network, a firm based in Guilford, Connecticut, won FDA clearance and is introducing its Butterfly iQ portable ultrasound system. It consists of a portable transducer that connects directly to an iPhone, and an iOS app to display the images and to control settings. The device actually works as three different transducers thanks to an...
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Muscles out of the spray can
A network of muscle fibers grows on spun plastic scaffold. Under a confocal laser scanning microscope the muscle fibers appear in red, and the cell nuclei in blue. An artificial heart would be an absolute lifesaver for people with cardiac failure. However, to recreate the complex organ in the laboratory, one would first need...
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Researchers design synthetic beta cells to secrete insulin in response to high blood sugar
Fluorescence image of the artificial beta cells. Treating type 1 diabetes and some cases of type 2 diabetes has long required painful and frequent insulin injections or a mechanical insulin pump for insulin infusion. But researchers from the University of North Carolina and NC State have now developed what could be a much more...
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This Doctor Diagnosed His Own Cancer with an iPhone Ultrasound
Can a smartphone-enabled ultrasound machine become medicine’s next stethoscope? Every marketer wants the perfect story to tell. But if you’re in medicine, you don’t want it to be about yourself. Earlier this year, vascular surgeon John Martin was testing a pocket-sized ultrasound device developed by Butterfly Network, a startup based in Guilford, Connecticut, that he’d just...
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Vibrating mask that helps you breathe easy: Device that shakes 100,000 times a second helps medication reduce symptoms faster
The device is a type of nebuliser – commonly used for inhaling medicine A trial in the U.S. showed the device could reduce hospital admissions The new Aerogen Solo mask has a 5mm-wide vibrating mesh with 1,000 perforations which shrinks the droplets of medicine further. A vibrating mask may make it easier and faster to...
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Bioresponsive Hydrogel Can Release Proteins on Cue
Researchers at Penn State have developed a DNA-laced hydrogel that mimics biological systems by releasing a proteins in response to a chemical signal, a technology which could be useful for drug delivery. The system has potential for on-demand release of therapeutic proteins, also known as biologics, to treat a variety of conditions. Hydrogels are composed...
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DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%
IN BRIEF An international team of scientists has created a non-invasive device that stimulates the brain to improve cognitive function. In tests on macaques, it reportedly increased the monkeys’ learning speed by 40 percent. CHEAP AND NON-INVASIVE New research funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has successfully demonstrated how a...
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Research team turns smartphone into a powerful microscope in the fight against infectious diseases
Postdoctoral researcher Dali Sun holds a mobile phone adaptation of a dark-field microscope, which could be used in developing areas where access to a traditional desktop dark-field microscope might not be possible. With smartphones millions of times more powerful than the NASA Apollo computers that sent us to the moon in the 1960s, scientists...