Medical home diagnostic tools

from gizmag:

Using online medical resources to diagnose our various aches and pains is just as likely to send someone rushing to the doctor in the belief they have some incurable, life-threatening disease as it is to put any fears to rest. Medical startup Scanadu, which is based at the NASA-Ames Research Center, is set to provide a set of home diagnostic tools that are designed to let users monitor their health over time and provide a better indication of whether a trip to the doc is actually necessary.

While Scanadu continues working on a tricorder-like device capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases in an attempt to claim the US10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, it has just revealed its first three consumer health products that are designed to put a doctor in your pocket.

Full text at:

http://www.gizmag.com/scanadu-scout-scanaflu-scanflo/25240/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=8727133184-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email

Oregon State University engineers develop tiny, inexpensive chip to monitor vital signs

from Oregon Live:

Call them toys or call them training tools, electronic fitness monitors can offer intriguing insight into everything from the rate at which your heart beats to the number of steps you take or calories you expend over the course of the day. 

Typically they're not cheap, though. Take, for instance, Nike's $150 FuelBand, or Fitbit brand monitors costing $55 to $99 that can track your activity or sleep.

Now, electrical engineering students and faculty at Oregon State University hope to give such gizmos a run for their money. They've developed, are patenting and planning to take to market technology that can monitor vital signs with sensors so miniscule and inexpensive they could fit on a small adhesive bandage, cost less than 25 cents and be disposable.

In collaboration with private industry, they expect to move the sensor-packed microchip, the size and thickness of a postage stamp, into the consumer marketplace, perhaps by mid 2013.

Plus, they'll pursue U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval so the system could one day be used in everyday medical care.

Full text at:

http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2012/11/oregon_state_university_engine.html

Implants that don't need an external charge could make it easy to aid hearing.

from arstechnica.com

key words: cochlea chip,  self-sufficient, self-powering implants

Inner ear implant uses biological battery to self-charge. A team of surgeons, neuroscientists, and electrical engineers has developed a cochlea chip that extracts electrical signals from the inner ear to power itself. The chip is the latest in a series of inventions aimed at creating entirely self-sufficient, self-powering implants that will remove the need for external power and enable permanent surgical implantation in some cases. This year alone, Stanford University announced the creation of its radio wave-powered heart implant and infrared light-powered retinal implants.

Cochlear implants have been around for decades, with the first electrical stimulation of auditory nerves taking place in the 50s. Though the implant has been a great success, with hundreds of thousands of people with severe hearing difficulties receiving the implant each year, they still run on batteries so are fairly cumbersome. MIT hopes to change all that by taking advantage of a natural battery that lies dormant within the ear.

"In the past, people have thought that the space where the high potential [in the ear] is located is inaccessible for implantable devices, because potentially it's very dangerous if you encroach on it," said Konstantina Stankovic, an otologic surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. "We have known for 60 years that this battery exists and that it's really important for normal hearing, but nobody has attempted to use this battery to power useful electronics."

Full text at: 

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/inner-ear-implant-uses-biological-battery-to-self-charge/