The Outer Ear is a non-surgical concept system for the hearing impaired that detects sound-waves and converts them into physical vibration. A watch-like wrist-strap acts as the receiver and transmits a signal via Bluetooth to a device mounted on the arm which in turn converts the sound into low, medium or high vibrations depending on the frequency.Designed by Jack Allwood, student at Swinburne University Australia, the Outer Ear can be adjusted for outdoors and indoors. The outdoor setting picks up sounds with higher decibels allowing the wearer to feel traffic and other loud noises, while the indoor adjustment picks up sounds more nearby, for instance timers, door bells or even babies and children.
Seen initially as a safety tool for deaf and hard of hearing persons, Allwood suggests that the Outer Ear also has the potential to improve human relationships and aid enjoyment of music by deaf people without the surgery required for devices like the Cochlear implant.
1. Caffeine Can Kill You
Measurements of haemoglobin A1c (Hb A1C) more accurately identify persons at risk for clinical outcomes than the commonly used measurement of fasting glucose, according to a study published in the March 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Damage to knee cartilage is one of the more common types of sports injuries. Treatment often involves drilling a hole through the cartilage into the bone to stimulate the bone marrow to release stem cells, transplanting cartilage and the underlying bone from another part of the joint, or removing cartilage cells from the body, stimulating them to grow in the lab and re-implanting them. Now MIT engineers have built a new tissue scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when transplanted into knees and other joints, potentially offering a more effective, less expensive – and painful – option to more conventional therapies.
Researchers at Bionic Vision Australia (BVA) have produced a prototype version of a bionic eye implant that could be ready to start restoring rudimentary vision to blind people as soon as 2013. The system consists of a pair of glasses with a camera built in, a processor that fits in your pocket, and an ocular implant that sits against the retina at the back of the eye and electronically stimulates the retinal neurons that send visual information to the brain. The resulting visual picture is blocky and low-res at this point, but the technology is bound to improve, and even in its current form it's going to be a major life-changer for those with no vision at all. And the future potential - even for sighted people - is fascinating.
Nanotechnology is increasingly a part of our lives, and while it has enormous potential for the effective delivery of medication and fighting cancer, there are concerns about health effects such as toxicity and tissue damage. Now a team of scientists has shown that carbon nanotubes can be broken down by an enzyme found in white blood cells - contradicting the previous belief they are not broken down in the body or nature - and hope this new understanding may lead to a way to render carbon nanotubes harmless in medical applications.
Making use of novel lensless imaging technology, a UCLA engineer has invented the world’s smallest, lightest telemedicine microscope. The self-contained device could radically transform global health care – particularly in Third World countries – with its ability to image blood samples or other fluids. It can even be used to test water quality in the field following a disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.
Each year, around 80,000 people in Germany become seriously ill from occlusions of veins caused by blood clots. Such thromboses can cause pulmonary embolism or even heart attacks. Although it wouldn’t have been of much concern over the past week thanks to the ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano grounding flights across Europe, air travel is recognized as a risk factor for deep vein thrombosis with evidence showing the wearing of compression socks or tights while traveling reduces the incidence of thrombosis in people on long flights. However many people don’t wear such items as they don’t realize they may be at risk. A new fast and easy test of the risk of travel-related thrombosis will soon be possible – and all airline passengers will have to relinquish is one drop of blood.
According to the American Diabetes Association around one in every 400 to 600 children and adolescents has type 1 diabetes – also known as IDDM, or juvenile diabetes. Currently there is no known way to prevent the disease which requires sufferers to administer insulin usually via injection or a pump. Using a nanotechnology-based "vaccine," researchers were able to successfully cure mice with type 1 diabetes and slow the onset of the disease.
Asthma is a clinical condition in which there occurs reversible airway obstruction due to airway hyper-sensitivity and characterized by cough, difficulty in breathing, chest tightness and presence of a whistle like sound while breathing. Airway hyper-sensitivity is triggered by various factors which lead to acute obstruction of the airway.
Functional gastrointestinal disorders are very much common and are explained by the absence of any organ pathology. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional bowel disorder which is associated with abdominal pain commonly with a change in bowel habit.