An Ultrathin Brain Implant Monitors Seizures

Doctors now can put an array of electrodes on the surface of the brain to pinpoint the source of epileptic seizures. Thin, flexible electrodes mounted on top of a biodegradable silk substrate could provide a better brain-machine interface. The device wraps around the crevices in the surface of the brain. These neural interfaces take higher-resolution measurements than what's available today without irritating or scarring brain tissue. It has shown substantial results and technical accomplishments on cats.

If this piece of bio-integrated electronic device proves itself in human beings, it will help in understanding the function of human brain. And this results in brain computer interface. Besides, this will help in diagnostic and treatment procedures of many chronic diseases. 

see full article, http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39158/?mod=chfeatured

A Nightshirt to Monitor Sleep

 

If you suffer from sleep disorders, or know anyone who does, then you have definitely heard of the complex process they have to go through to assess the level of sleep depravity they suffer from.  Not only that, but also needs to be strapped to a complex array of sensors that monitor brain activity, muscle activity, eye movement, and heart and breathing rate.  Nyx Devices has developed a nightshirt that is embedded with fabric electronics to monitor the wearer's breathing patterns. A small chip worn in a pocket of the shirt processes that data to determine the phase of sleep, such as REM sleep (when we dream), light sleep, or deep sleep.

"It has no adhesive and doesn't need any special setup to wear," says Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-inventor of the shirt with Carson Darling, Pablo Bello, and Thomas Lipoma. "It's very easy—you just slip it on at night," says Bianchi, who has no formal role with Nyx Devices.  Nyx's Somnus shirt dramatically simplifies this by focusing only on respiration. "It turns out that you can tell if someone is awake or asleep and which stage of sleep they are in purely based on breathing pattern," says Bianchi. "That's a much easier signal to analyze than electrical activity from the brain." 

During REM sleep, the respiratory pattern is irregular, with differences in the size of breaths and the spacing between them. Breathing during deep sleep follows an ordered pattern, "like a sine wave," says Bianchi. "And the breath-to-breath differences are very small." The lighter stages of non-REM sleep fall somewhere in between. "The motivation behind the shirt is to allow repeated measurements over time in the home," he adds.  Analyzing sleep stages based on respiration is still considered experimental. But Bianchi is now testing the device on patients who come to his sleep clinic who are also assessed using standard technology, known as polysomnography. The team will soon begin home tests of the shirts to further validate its use outside of the lab. The company hopes to have a commercial product available by summer of 2012 for less than $100. 

see full article at http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/37606/?mod=related

TeslaTouch: Electrovibration for Touch Surfaces

Touch screens have become very popular nowadays, in smart phones, iPods, iPads, and tablets, but all feels the same, just touching a glass.  The new touch screens will allow users to feel the touch. 

 According to the article, The new type of touch screens will uses a small static force to control friction between a user’s finger and the touch. The proposed technology is based on the electro vibration principle, does not use any moving parts and provides a wide range of tactile feedback sensations to fingers moving across a touch surface. When combined with an interactive display and touch input, it enables the design of a wide variety of interfaces that allow the user to feel virtual elements through touch. In the case of a touch screen keyboard users would be able to feel the location of the keys, and could learn to “touch type” without looking at their hands. Read the full article at http://www.disneyresearch.com/research/projects/teslatouchuist2010.pdf

OmniTouch: Wearable Multitouch Interaction Everywhere

Researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University created a prototype called OmiTouch that enables graphical, interactive, multitouch input on arbitrary, everyday surfaces.

According to the paper, The shoulder-worn implementation allows users to manipulate interfaces projected onto the environment (e.g., walls, tables), held objects (e.g.,notepads, books), and their own bodies (e.g., hands, lap). A key contribution is our depth-driven template matching and clustering approach to multitouch finger tracking. This enables on-the-go interactive capabilities, with no calibration, training or instrumentation of the environment or the user,

According to the paper, it is entirely possible that a future incarnation of OmniTouch could be the size of a box of matches, worn as pendent or watch. Thus, the benefit of extreme portability.

See the full paper http://chrisharrison.net/projects/omnitouch/omnitouch.pdf

An ECG for the iPhone

The future of medicine is changing rapidly with the emergence of mobile computing. A system developed by AliveCor that converts the iPhone or iPad into a clinical quality electrocardiograph (ECG) device. The system involves an application that can work with any iPhone or iPad and a card with electrodes (iCard) that is smaller than a business card which sticks to the back of the iPhone or iPad. 

 The company claims that the iphone ECG system gives an accurate clean clinical quality electrocardiograph. According to the company, the iphone ECG records and uploads the reading onto a server and converts into a pdf file for analysis by a medical professional within five seconds.   

  

  

  

From Your Heart to Your iPhone

Smartphones are becoming the center of our lives and changing our behaviors.  Smart phones applications became more sophisticated incorporating external sensors and intelligence to monitor and give recommendations to users.  A new smartphone application that is under development will allow heart-failure patient to keep track of the pressure inside their heart as measured by an implanted sensor.

According to the article, the researchers hope it will help patients better manage their health and reduce hospitalizations, which are responsible for much of the $40 million in health-care costs linked to heart failure. See the full article at http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38673/?p1=MstRcnt

Better Hearing Is Being Made More Convenient

Smartphone’s technology is advancing constantly and become the center of our life.  It evolved from simple organizer to including camera, GPS, email, Internet browsing and thousands of applications that allows us to manage our business and life with more ease and fun. One of the newest smartphone applications and a finalist in the 2011 Asian Innovation Awards,  is an application that can enhance your hearing.

 According to the article, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903520204576485174026037728.html#articleTabs%3Darticle, a group of hearing health professionals and sound engineers has created a Smartphone application that can assess your hearing profile and then calibrate the phone to enhance its sound output to match your needs. Users will be able to assess their own hearing in a quiet room by performing a hearing test that takes about five minutes. The device will capture and assess the individuals hearing profile, and then calibrate the Smartphone to adjust and enhance its sound output by filling in gaps in the part of the sound spectrum where hearing is less than ideal. It doesn't just make everything louder. 

 The team hopes to move beyond Smartphone’s in the near future, and implant the ACEHearing firmware in headsets, earphones, MP3 players and even telephone servers and switchboards.