technology

MIT Expert: New Tech Means Bomb Amputees Could Run 2014 Marathon

“I’ll make the following claim: If a person has lost a leg in this Boston attack — if they’re motivated and generally healthy and reasonably athletic — they could, given current technology, they could walk or run across the finish line at the Boston Marathon this time next year.”

Making that bold statement is Hugh Herr, the renowned prosthetics and assistive technology expert who heads the Biomechatronics research group at MIT’s Media Lab (and is himself a double amputee). That’s what he said in response to my question about the future of the many victims who lost legs in Monday’s Marathon bombing. The current count, according to area hospitals, is 13 amputations.

What accounts for Herr’s optimism? Well, he’s already developed the world’s first powered ankle-foot prosthesis, which is being sold commercially and has been used by about 500 people. Also, Herr is a highly motivated guy: six months after his lower legs were amputated in 1982 after a climbing accident in which he got severe frostbite, he was walking — and climbing mountains again.

Indeed, Herr’s own artificial limbs are pretty powerful, with “…12 computers, five sensors and muscle-like actuator systems that able me to move throughout my day,” he told Terry Gross back in 2011.

These days, he said, speaking by phone from Spain, the long-term prognosis for patients with legs amputated below the knee, whether it’s one or both legs, “is very good.” For instance, the person will be able to “drive a car without hand controls, walk or run if they’re inclined,” he said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, amputation, Boston Marathon Bombing, technology

January 24, 2013 | 9:48 AM |

Your Kid On Video Games: Creative Outlet Or More Like Crack Cocaine?

Don’t miss Carey’s excellent radio piece this morning on how her son Tully’s intense fascination with video games — some violent — might play out as he grows up. The piece also raises important questions about whether such testosterone-fueled games actually make kids more violent, or whether they help the children become more adventurous and creative, better problem solvers and critical thinkers.

I encourage you to listen to the full piece, including current 20-something gamers speaking about the upside of playing video games as children. Here’s a bit:

Tully started playing video games when he was still in preschool, first driving games because he was obsessed with cars, and then more elaborate games of exploration and battle.

His game-playing sparked the only major parenting conflict I’ve ever had with my husband, a software developer who’s worked on games and wanted to introduce Tully to their fun challenges. As a mother, I felt all my alarms going off: too much violence, too much screen time. At one point I even played the crack-cocaine card, as in: “You’re introducing our child to the media equivalent of crack cocaine!”

But then my attitude began to shift. Tully picked up reading early because he so wanted to decipher instructions on the screen. He started to spout historical facts. And he played one particular spelling game, “Bookworm,” that was undeniably violent but also clearly educational — and I loved it. You got a grid of letters, and the longer a word you spelled, the harder you got to clobber a mythical enemy. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, children's health, mental health, technology, video games

December 13, 2012 | 10:35 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Food Allergies? New Personalized Testing Device Detects Peanuts, Gluten In A Pinch

I am banned from bringing most snacks to my daughter’s first grade classroom because so many kids have food allergies — some life-threatening. So I can envision this nifty new gadget — a personalized food allergy testing device that runs on a cellphone — making its way into cubbies around the nation in the not-too-distant future.

Within one second, researchers report online in the cool sounding journal Lab On A Chip, the device can analyze a food sample and detect and quantify the allergen contamination in food products, including peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts. In the published report, researchers said they successfully detected and accurately quantified peanut levels in commercially available cookies.

The device, called the iTube, is an attachment that “uses the cell phone’s built-in camera, along with an accompanying smart-phone application that runs a test with the same high level of sensitivity a laboratory would,” researchers say.

(Photo: UCLA)

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, food allergies, research, technology

November 30, 2012 | 9:10 AM |

When The Vegetative Patient May Be Able To Communicate

By Judy Foreman
Guest Contributor

One of the most vexing emotional and ethical issues in all of medicine is the decision by family members to “pull the plug,” that is, to take a severely ill, non-communicate relative off of the life-support systems keeping him or her alive.

What makes this decision so hard, of course, is, absent a really clear statement ahead of time from the patient about end-of-life wishes, family members basically have to guess. But there may be – not yet, but someday – a way to make this agonizing guesswork a bit easier, thanks to a stunning series of recent experiments by Adrian Owen, who holds the prestigious Canada Excellence Research Chair in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging at the University of Western Ontario.

(Digital Shotgun/flickr)

The recent work by Owen, and others, using fMRI brain scanning technology shows that some patients diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state may actually have some degree of consciousness and be able to communicate, that is, by sheer thinking, be capable of answering comparatively simple questions such as “are you in pain?” (Obviously, that’s a much simpler question than “do you want to die?”)

The particular patient generating the latest excitement is 39-year old Scott Routley who, 12 years ago, had a car accident that left him with a severe brain injury. By standard tests, doctors thought he was in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, Science, coma, neuroscience, technology, the brain

November 6, 2012 | 11:38 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Reuters: Controversial GMO Measure May Be Killed By Big Food

A controversial question on the California ballot may have a major impact on the foods you eat — no matter what state you live in. The question, known as Proposition 37, is whether labeling should be required on foods that have been genetically modified.

While the measure appeared to have solid support as recently as last month, opposition by big food companies may kill the proposal, Reuters reports. If passed, it would be the first such law in the nation.

(Timothy Valentine/flickr)

Still, as goes California, so goes the nation so it’s worth considering:

Major food and seed companies appear to be on the verge of defeating a California ballot initiative that, if passed on Tuesday, would create the first labeling requirement for genetically modified foods in the United States.

In a campaign reminiscent of this summer’s successful fight against a proposed tobacco tax in California, opposition funded by Monsanto Co, DuPont, PepsiCo Inc and others unleashed waves of TV and radio advertisements against Proposition 37 and managed to turn the tide of public opinion. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Money, Personal Health, Politics, food, genetically modified food, technology

October 30, 2012 | 10:11 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Painless, Quick-Release Medical Tape Reduces Infant Skin Injuries

Pain-free bandages? I’ll take ‘em.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and MIT report today that they’ve invented a quick-release medical tape that will minimize injuries for delicately-skinned newborns.

Here’s the Brigham news release:

Commercial medical tapes on the market today are great at keeping medical devices attached to the skin, but often can do damage—such as skin tissue tearing—once it’s time to remove them.

A research team from Brigham and Women’s Hospital has invented a quick-release tape that has the strong adhesion properties of commercial medical tape, but without the ouch factor upon removal.

The team was led by Jeffrey Karp, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Medicine, senior study author in collaboration with The Institute for Pediatric Innovation which defined the need and requirements for a new neonatal adhesive based on national surveys of neonatal clinicians.

The study detailing the tape design will be electronically published on October 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was conducted in collaboration with Robert Langer, PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The tape which achieves strong adhesion when securing medical devices to skin, but could also easily peel off safely, utilizes a three-layer design approach that sets a new paradigm for quick-release medical tapes. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, newborns, pediatrics, technology

October 16, 2012 | 2:05 PM |

Toward A More Emotionally Astute Machine

Read this great story in The New York Times today by CommonHealth contributor Karen Weintraub on the future of affective programming, or teaching machines to read facial expressions and emotions. Here’s the lede:

In a Cairo school basement, two dozen women analyze facial expressions on laptops, training the computers to recognize anger, sadness and frustration.

At Cambridge University, an eerily realistic robotic head named Charles sits in a driving simulator, furrowing its brows, looking interested or confused.

And in a handful of American middle school classrooms this fall, computers will monitor students’ emotions in an effort to track when they are losing interest and when they are getting excited about lessons.

All three are examples of an emerging approach to technology called affective computing, which aims to give computers the ability to read users’ emotions, or “affect.”

People are good at understanding one another’s emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled.

Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window. The online class keeps going even when half the students are lost in confusion. The airport security system can’t tell whether someone is behaving as if he were concealing something or is just anxious about flying.

The piece details work by Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Picard and her colleagues are developing technology to measure emotional arousal through skin sensors, something that might ultimately provide a kind of lifeline for people with autism or similar disorders who have difficulty making social connections and communicating emotions: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, autism, facial recognition, machine learning, psychology, technology

October 16, 2012 | 8:29 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Amanda Palmer, Tweeting On Health Insurance, Hits A Nerve

Hat tip to Martha Bebinger who writes on her Healthcare Savvy blog about musician/performer/social media phenomenon Amanda Palmer’s new fascination with health insurance.

Amanda Palmer tweets on health insurance and her ever-reliable fans respond. (Photo: amandapalmer.net)

Here’s the story behind Palmer’s #InsurancePoll:

It all started when Palmer, casually reading The Sunday Times and tweeting on the train, came across Nick Kristof’s heartbreaking column this weekend about his old friend and college roommate dying of prostate cancer in large part because he had no health insurance (and as a result, continuously delayed medical care until he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer). Palmer writes on her blog that the column moved her deeply:

it hit a nerve with me, and i sent a few musing tweets about my own experiences with insurance…

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don’t have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.

when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn’t seem like an option. (cont…)

my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank…(cont).

…and so they DEMANDED i get insurance. we fought. they offered to pay half. i agreed. i was lucky. many aren’t. think about it. #AndVote.

…and then people starting musing back at me, in their own tweets, about their own experiences with insurance. i could tell i’d hit somewhat of a nerve with THEM, and then it occurred to me that’d it’d probably lead to a fascinating cross-section of
information if i asked everybody on my feed what their current situation was…

So Palmer decide to conduct a little survey and almost immediately, her 698K Twitter followers began to respond:

quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?

…and my feed EXPLODED. EXPLODED. i found out that twitter has a twitter LIMIT (you can’t tweet more than 100 tweets/RTs in an hour – which is probably to prevent actual pornbots and such) and i went to “twitter jail” twice. but the force of what people wanted to share was unstoppable. i think i probably got more than 2k responses to the question. i only wish that i could have shared every single response, because the story it’s all telling is huge. deep. painful. crazy.

Now, she’s heard from teachers and nurses, a British doctor with free NHS care, “thank goodness” and a U.S. writer who lost her coverage when she left an abusive spouse and now can’t afford insurance at all. Two breast cancer survivors tweeted that they couldn’t get coverage because they are deemed “high-risk.” The response was so overwhelming that Palmer recruited a volunteer to help tally the data: Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Insurance, amanda palmer, social media, technology

October 12, 2012 | 1:15 PM | Rachel Zimmerman

Desperately Seeking A Tampon? There’s An App For That

For 18-year-old Olenka Polak, the eureka moment came in a Harvard bathroom.

While at the college’s innovation lab attending a recent “start-up scramble” aimed at helping young entrepreneurs develop new ideas, Olenka, a sopohmore, went to the women’s restroom and was pleasantly surprised by a basket full of free tampons. How cool, she thought. But then she wondered: What if there were no free tampons and the vending machine was out of order and you were just plain stuck in “a periodic emergency?”

That’s when Olenka had the flash: “Wouldn’t it be cool to have this community of women on a mobile platform and have this kind of tampon hand-off where you could earn points for donating a tampon to a fellow sister in need?”

With this vision of girl-power camraderie dancing in her head, Olenka returned to the event, raised her hand and pitched her idea: There, Code Red, the mobile tampon app, was born.

The mobile app would allow users to send out a “red alert” if they were stuck in an emergency without a tampon.

A Code Red team including Olenka and two other women — Isha Agarwal and Yogeeta Manglani, both 24-year-old graduate students in global health at Harvard’s School of Public Health — quickly coalesced and started brainstorming. They came up with a simple prototype: a mobile app that would allow women in need to send out a “red alert” that would ping other nearby users who could rush over and delivery a tampon or sanitary pad or share information on where the nearest working tampon vending machine might be. (The machines are usually out of order and in some buildings simply non-existent, said Agarwal, who is also a student at Harvard Medical School.)

The interface the team has developed asks whether a pad or tampon is preferred; respondents can send back a yes or no answer about whether help is on the way. They can also initiate a chat, to say, for example, “class is just wrapping up, I’ll be there in 10 minutes.” The mockup also includes “health bytes,” a running ticker of women’s health stories to read while you’re waiting. The mapping system would track and update users’ GPS locations with each ping.

Security is clearly an issue and the team has proposed an initial launch within the Harvard community to enable a verification system using Harvard ID numbers.

But beyond tampon distribution, the Code Red team hopes to broaden its reach and become a platform for other types of women’s health needs.

For example, the app might include an automatic phone reminder for women to change their tampons in order to cut their risk of toxic shock syndrome. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, menstruation, tampons, technology, women's health

September 18, 2012 | 11:36 AM | Rachel Zimmerman

Questioning The True Cost-Savings Of Digitized Health Care Records

(MC4 Army/flickr)

In an opinion piece today in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard professor Stephen Soumarai argues that the savings promised from electronic health records is little more than hype.

Soumerai, a professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, writing with Ross Koppel, a professor of sociology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the IT guys selling this stuff are promising huge savings that “turn out to be chimerical:”

Since 2009, almost a third of health providers, a group that ranges from small private practices to huge hospitals—have installed at least some “health IT” technology. It wasn’t cheap. For a major hospital, a full suite of technology products can cost $150 million to $200 million. Implementation—linking and integrating systems, training, data entry and the like—can raise the total bill to $1 billion.

But the software—sold by hundreds of health IT firms—is generally clunky, frustrating, user-unfriendly and inefficient. For instance, a doctor looking for a patient’s current medications might have to click and scroll through many different screens to find that essential information. Depending on where and when information on a patient’s prescriptions were entered, the complete list of medications may only be found across five different screens.

Now, a comprehensive evaluation of the scientific literature has confirmed what many researchers suspected: The savings claimed by government agencies and vendors of health IT are little more than hype. Continue reading →