Health Tech

Shortly before midnight on a recent business trip to Detroit, a 40-year-old man sent his wife the following text messages over the course of two minutes:

"Oh baby your"

"I am happy."

"I am out of it, just woke up, can't make sense, I can't even type, call if ur awake, love you."

Concerned, his wife had him go to a hospital the next morning, where a routine bed test -- including assessment of fluency of speech, reading, writing, and comprehension -- indicated he was fine. The doctors did note a very slight slackness on one side of his face. Then they handed him a smartphone and asked him to type, "The doctor needs a new BlackBerry."

He texted, "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb," looked it over, and concluded that his message contained no errors. (He was also, it seems, unable to crack any BlackBerry jokes.)… Read more

An electrical engineer at Stanford has led the effort to develop an endoscope that is not only as thin as a human hair but also boasts a resolution four times better than existing ultrathin models. The "micro-endoscope" could lead to far less invasive bio-imaging, making it easier and safer to peer inside living organs and tissue to, say, study the brain and detect cancer.

The researchers, led by Joseph Kahn at the Stanford School of Engineering, report in the journal Optics Express and the Optical Society of America's Spotlight in Optics that the prototype can resolve objects … Read more

Oddly enough, fish and wildlife officers in the dry, desert state of Arizona confiscate a fair number of alligators each year. Unfortunate alligator Mr. Stubbs was one of those captured critters when he was brought to the Phoenix Herpetological Society back in 2005. He arrived minus a very important body part: his tail.

Tailless Mr. Stubbs had to learn how to swim by paddling with his front feet, something that probably caused all the other alligators to snicker at him behind his back. More recently, the society and CORE Institute, a center specializing in orthopedic care for people, banded together to craft a new prosthetic tail for the gator.… Read more

Doctors have already replaced a patient's jaw with a 3D-printed titanium implant, so why not part of a skull? Earlier this week, 75 percent of an American patient's skull was surgically replaced with a custom-made implant produced by a 3D printer from Oxford Performance Materials.

The full name of the implant is the OsteoFab Patient Specific Cranial Device. The implant is made from PEKK biomedical polymer and printed using CAD files developed to fit each person. The world of skulls is not one-size-fits-all. Much like an expensive pair of bespoke shoes, these skull implants are unique to the individual.… Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

In journalism, there's a phrase you'll often hear that refers to the paragraph toward the beginning of a story that sums it all up in a nutshell. We call it the "nut graph," and as you're about to read, it's a term that's never been more appropriate than in the case of Joshua Shoemake's current project on Kickstarter.

Shoemake is looking to crowdfund $20,000 for the first production run of Snowballs, a specially designed pair of men's underwear loaded with ice packs that cool down the scrotum and testes in hopes of increasing sperm count and mobility (and ergo, fertility)… Read more

SEATTLE -- Technology giants such as Google and apparel makers such as Nike are pouring millions into wearable computing, betting that it's one of the next untapped frontiers in consumer electronics.

Runners slip sensors into their shoes to track how far they've gone. Insomniacs wear wristbands to monitor their sleep habits. Skiers don goggles with heads-up displays to see how fast they're moving.

But wearable computing remains a niche business. Even as the cost and size of the sensors the devices use has dropped, and the ability to transmit the data those sensors collect to smartphones has … Read more

When it comes to scientific research, size matters -- and yes, bigger is better.

So it may come as no surprise that scientists at Stanford, Columbia, and Microsoft have used Internet search data to uncover prescription drug side effects faster than the FDA's current gold standard, the Adverse Event Reporting System. After all, the data miners had the activity of some 6 million Internet users at their disposal, whereas the FDA relies on physicians to notice and report problems.

Reporting today in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the researchers write that by analyzing Google, Microsoft, and … Read more

Testing for strokes can be inaccurate and expensive. But a new device that looks like a pair of swimming goggles may offer a better, cheaper alternative, and save tens of thousands of lives every year.

The goggles, equipped with an infrared camera attached to a cord that goes to a laptop computer, measure eye movements, Dr. David Newman-Toker, an associate professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained on "CBS This Morning."

"The eye movements (when) patients present with strokes in the back part of the brain -- and that's about one out of every four strokes -- the patients present with dizziness and vertigo and we can tell from their eye movements whether they've had a stroke or whether they have a benign inner-ear condition, quickly and easily," said Newman-Toker, who is leading the study of the new technique.

The goggles will work best as strokes occur, Newman-Toker said, and will likely find use in emergency rooms. … Read more