health

Plan your workout in 3D

iMuscle helps you work out by showing you a 3D representation of the human body with the musculature exposed and animations of the muscle groups used for specific exercises. The app offers over 450 3D animations to show how stretches and exercises effect your body--a great workout aid when your at the gym and want to know how to best focus on specific muscle groups.

The interface of iMuscle lets you choose an area of the "Muscleman" you want to work on and then zooms in on the area. You then get a list of thumbnails that work … Read more

Start-up ZocDoc announces $50 million funding round

New York start-up ZocDoc plans to expand its online booking service for doctor and dentist appointments to more cities with help from a $50 million Series C venture round from DST Global announced today.

DST Global, which has invested in Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, and Zynga, is also putting its money on ZocDoc, adding to the $20 million the company had previously received from Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures.

ZocDoc is adding about a city a month to its existing roster of urban markets, which include Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., … Read more

Study: Cell phones don't increase brain tumor risk in kids

Children who use cell phones are at no greater risk of developing brain tumors, the latest paper in a series of epidemiological studies suggests.

The study, which was conducted in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland, was recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It surveyed almost 1,000 children between ages 7 and 19. The group looked at children who had been diagnosed with brain tumors between 2004 and 2008, as well as a control group drawn randomly from the general population.

Subjects were asked about how often they used their cell phones for voice calls. Some … Read more

Basis strong-arms other wearable body sensors

Wearable body sensors are in. We've got the Fitbit pedometer, the BodyMedia armband, and the Lark sleep sensor on the market, and Jawbone's Up arriving soon. Joining the fray is what may be the heavy hitter in this fight: the Basis Band.

This wrist-wearable sensor offers the most sensors. In addition to measuring motion (which the other products do), Basis also tracks skin temperature, ambient temperature, galvanic skin response (sweat level), heart rate, and blood oxygen level, which it gets by measuring the spectrum of light reflected back from a green laser that illuminates the skin where the device straps on to the wrist.

The Basis runs its Tricorder functions continuously and stores its telemetry for later upload (over USB or Bluetooth). The device itself doesn't have enough smarts to tell the user if they're exercising enough or how healthy they are; the Basis service has to process the information first and gives the user usable information about their health and activity on their own private Web page.

One of the big tricks in the Basis algorithms is its capability to determine your activity--walking, running, typing, etc.--even though the device is strapped to your wrist, where a lot of the motion is obviously unrelated to what the rest of your body is doing. CEO Jef Holove thinks that the company's data processing chops are its secret weapon and the competitive barrier to entry. The sensor technology in the Basis is not exactly rocket science; the cool oxygen sensor is standard medical tech, for example. … Read more

Microsoft offers transfer tool to Google Health users

For the seeming handful of people who signed up to use the soon-to-be-shuttered Google Health online medical records service, Microsoft has an answer: join its service.

Microsoft released a tool today that lets Google Health customers transfer their personal health information to a Microsoft HealthVault account. To protect patient privacy, the tool uses the Direct Project messaging protocols established by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT that authenticate and encrypt the data, sending it only to known, trusted recipients.

On June 24, Google announced plans to euthanize the three-year-old Google Health. The company said it will shut … Read more

Study: No link between brain tumors, cell phones

A new study out of Denmark suggests that cell phone use may not increase your risk of some types of noncancerous brain tumors.

Reuters reported this week on a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology that found people who used a cell phone for 11 to 15 years were no more likely to develop an acoustic neuroma, a noncancerous brain tumor, than people who have been using cell phones for either a shorter period of time or who have never used a cell phone.

Even though acoustic neuroma, or vestibular schwannoma, as it is also known, is noncancerous, … Read more

Jawbone launching Up, a fitness bracelet

Bluetooth audio accessory company Jawbone is extending its line into health and fitness. Later this year the company will launch a motion-recording wristband called Up that will connect to smartphone apps. It will be able to discern when its user is exercising, sleeping, or eating, Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman told me.

Rahman announced the product at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Tuesday. It was, he says, more of a concept launch than a product release. He did not disclose when the product will be available or how much it will cost. Rather, he was hoping to generate interest … Read more

MelApp checks for skin cancer, tracks moles

You may not have thought of using your iPhone to catalog your moles and freckles, but Health Discovery Corporation has. The company is the developer behind MelApp, a $1.99 iOS app that gives you a risk assessment for melanoma on your skin.

According to the American Melanoma Foundation, one American dies of melanoma every hour. It's worthwhile to dedicate a little time to watching your moles.

Here's the process. Take a picture of a suspicious mole with your camera. Label it, mark the diameter, and indicate how fast the mole's evolution has been. Click on the "Check Risk" button.

The image is uploaded to a server and run through an image analysis risk assessment process. According to the app's developer, MelApp has been validated using an image database licensed from John Hopkins University Medical Center.

MelApp comes back with a high- or low-risk diagnosis based on five parameters ranging from mole asymmetry to rate of evolution. A self-assessment feature can help verify the app's findings.… Read more

Researchers mine tweets in search of health trends

The explosion of social media has given researchers a lot of data to mine and trends to identify, but two computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University say they've developed sophisticated filtering software that is attracting particular attention from public health officials.

Twitter, which launched five years ago, has already been used by computer scientists to try to track the flu.

But when Johns Hopkins University computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul devised a method to filter and categorize health-related tweets, they weren't sure what they might find. So they decided to sort the tweets (they filtered 1.… Read more

Researchers cast doubt on cell-phone cancer risk

A new report has punched some holes into arguments that mobile phones may cause cancer.

"Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use can cause brain tumors in adults," researchers from the International Commission for Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection Standing Committee on Epidemiology concluded in their findings published late last week in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal.

In the journal, the researchers released findings on brain cancer instances for males and females across different age categories both before and after handsets were released. They found that the … Read more