If you were hoping to garner a bit more respect from passing strangers while listening to MP3s about the miracles of rainbows and magnets, I can’t think of an easier way than pretending to be a doctor. So just get yourself a pair of scrubs, and hope that Istanbul-based design shop Antrepo finds a manufacturer to produce their Stetheadphone headphones concept.
As you can see they’re designed to look like you’re wearing a stethoscope while listening to your music, though I suspect you’ll seem a little out of place wearing them outside of a hospital or bank heist setting. And like the earbuds that come with the iPod or iPhone they even feature an inline mic and remote allowing you to make and receive calls, as well as control your music. But feature lists don’t mean diddly squat when a product doesn’t exist yet, so hopefully Antrepo will push to make these a reality for medical school dropouts and doctor wannabes everywhere.
Just because it turns out you don’t have high blood pressure doesn’t necessarily mean that everything’s A-OK with your ticker. So this home blood pressure monitor does you an extra medical solid by also checking for a heart arrhythmia while it’s taking measurements. It uses the “oscillometric method” whereby it takes three consecutive pressure readings and then averages the results, and if it detects that your heart beat is 25% slower or faster than that average, an arrhythmia warning icon lights up on the LCD display. (Personally I’d prefer something a little less subtle.)
And in addition to that large LCD display with its oversized digits, the monitor will also store up to 30 time-and-date stamped measurements for up to 4 different users so you can keep an eye out for improvements or problems developing over time. $129.95 from Hammacher Schlemmer.
While most bright light treatments for seasonal affective disorder are designed for the eyes, the VALKEE is actually designed to be worn like a pair of earbuds, blasting the light towards your brain via your ear canals. According to their website it targets the brain’s photosensitive areas which can cause depression and mood swings when not receiving enough light, and is apparently more affective than blasting the eyes with light since the ear canal is the thinnest part of your skull. Now I hate to be skeptical about this approach, since it does seem to have a logical advantage. But ~$240(€185) is a hefty chunk of change for what are essentially in-ear LED flashlights.
The easiest way to prevent wrist strain while working at a computer is to keep your hands moving, and varying their position throughout the day. But as a blogger I can attest to the fact that the hours can easily slip away without you realizing you haven’t moved an inch. And before you know it you’re left with sore wrists, that only gets worse over time. And this is what the Engage Keyboard from Smartfish Technologies is designed to address.
The keyboard is split down the middle, and both the right and left sides are able to subtly shift up and down and left to right thanks to a set of whisper-quiet electric motors working inside. The movement is barely noticeable while you’re working away, but it’s apparently enough of a difference in position to prevent your wrists from feeling sore after working all day. By default the keyboard automagically makes its adjustments every hour, but it will also monitor your typing patterns and adjust it more frequently if you’re furiously typing away. Available now for $149.95.
A month or so ago we brought you a clever app called Pulse Phone that uses the iPhone’s camera and flash to measure your heart rate via your index finger. We found it worked well most of the time, but we wouldn’t consider it anything more than a party trick. In other words, you probably won’t be seeing it used in hospitals across the country anytime soon.
The iPhonECG however is a different story. It uses a slim, low-power sleeve with a couple of electrodes on the back to provide clinical-quality cardiac event readings. You can either hold it in your hands to get a reading of your pulse, or place it on your chest which makes it useful when dealing with a patient who can’t hold it themselves. The sleeve also works wirelessly with the iPhone 4, most likely via Bluetooth, and since it looks like it doesn’t attach to the dock connector I suspect you could get a reading even if you weren’t using it as a sleeve. The iPhonECG will be officially shown at CES next week, and we’ll do our best to hunt it down and get a hands-on.
A few years ago Microsoft Research showed off a prototype camera called the SenseCam which took a unique approach to photography. Instead of pulling out your camera to snap a random moment for posterity, the SenseCam is worn hanging from your neck all day and thanks to light, infrared (body heat) and other sensors, the camera’s fish eye lens continually snaps photos of your life. And a built-in intervalometer can even keep it capturing life’s little moments every 30 seconds, no matter how boring or mundane they may be.
The SenseCam was never available as an actual purchasable product from Microsoft, but a UK-based company called Vicon Motion Systems has licensed the technology for their Vicon Revue, which is essentially the exact same thing. Besides the obvious uses for creating documentaries and not-so-interesting YouTube time lapse videos, Vicon Motion Systems seems to be marketing the Revue as a useful tool for those suffering from memory impairment conditions like Alzheimer’s.
The included Revue Desktop software allows you to organize and annotate photos at the end of the day, though that could be a heck of a lot of work given the Revue’s battery is good for 12 continuous hours. And if you think it looks like a fun way to capture your life, the ~$775 (£500) price tag seems to be discouraging people from ordering one for just novelty use.
I’m no doctor, but I don’t think the best time to measure one’s blood pressure is while using a PC. But that’s exactly what a company called CalHealth wants you to do with their MDMouse which features a miniature flip-out finger cuff that auto-inflates to accurately measure a user’s blood pressure. The sphygmomanometer mouse, which was probably tossed around as a name option before they settled on MDMouse, comes with its own software too which not only records the blood pressure readings, but allows you to analyze the collected data over time. The readings can even be exported to a format that’s hospital system friendly if you’d prefer a bona fide doctor to look over your readings.
As for availability? Well the website boasts that “CalHealth anticipates having our first MDMouse product available for purchase during the third quarter of 2008″ which means they kind of missed their target. But according to Medgadget the MDMouse should be hitting the market in the next few months.
Instead of using a long pointy needle to deliver medication, which can be quite painful at times, the PharmaJet uses a high-speed liquid jet that literally blasts the medicine through your skin in less than 1/3 of a second. While the technology isn’t necessarily new, the PharmaJet improves on older designs with a sterile, single-use syringe and a spring-powered mechanism that requires no external power source besides the muscle needed to re-load it.
And since pain is a subjective feeling, the PharmaJet isn’t billed as being completely ‘pain-free’, but according to the company’s founder it feels like the equivalent of a tiny rubber band snapping against your skin. The injector, which can be reused thousands of times, currently costs about $100 while the single-use syringes run somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 cents to $1, probably closer to the latter. So they’re more expensive than traditional needles at the moment, but as production and use increases it could end up being a viable and even more cost-effective alternative to being stabbed in the arm.
It sounds like the type of device you’d see shilled on late-night TV or in the back pages of Popular Science, but the CoolSculpting system from ZELTIQ has just been approved by the FDA and could soon be a service offered by your local rhinoplastic surgeon. In essence the device kills fat cells under the skin by freezing them without damaging the skin itself, and once ‘dead’ the frostbitten fatty adipose tissue will then naturally be removed from the body VIA its metabolic processes.
With the CoolSculpting procedure, a specially designed cooling applicator is applied to the desired area of fat reduction to extract energy (cooling) from the underlying fat tissue without damage to other tissues. The applicator cup uses a gentle vacuum pressure to draw the tissue between the cooling panels. During the procedure, the applicator delivers precisely controlled cooling conditions that have been proven to target and eliminate fat cells in specific areas of the body. When fat cells are exposed to precise cooling, they trigger a process of natural removal that gradually reduces the thickness of the fat layer.
The ZELTIQ system controls the rate of energy extraction or cooling during the procedure. The result is a reduction in fat bulges that is visible in most patients in two to four months. The fat cells in the treated area are gradually eliminated through the body’s normal metabolic processes, similar to how fat from food is eliminated.
It’s not designed for serious weightloss, but it seems like a relatively painless way to reduce those love handles you’ve been trying to hide all Summer.
Related Tags: headphones, Medical
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