Items tagged with medicine
Google is responsible for a lot of things that have made our lives better. Better search, better email, and one impressive mobile operating system. But beyond its commercial success sits a research department that's doing fascinating stuff. Project Loon is helping rural areas around the globe receive Internet for the first time, and it appears that Google's fixation on health is going to extend well beyond a simple app. The company's Google X division has announced a project whereby researchers are building nanoparticles that "combine a magnetic material with antibodies or proteins that can attach to and detect other molecules inside the body." The goal? To enable patients to simply swallow a...
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Colonoscopies are somewhat shunned for the obvious reason: no one looks forward to a doctor snaking a camera on a flexible tube (an endoscope) through their colon (via the obvious entry point) to look for polyps or worse. A new self-propelled device known as a "Mermaid" might make the procedure less invasive, and less frightening. The Mermaid was developed by a Japanese research team. It is only about 0.4 inches in diameter and slightly less than 2 inches in length. It is propelled by a tail fin-like driving gear remotely controlled by an operator. Other such small devices were previously used, but relied on the motive force of a patient's digestive system to make it through the colon, which...
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Broadband speeds in the United States have incrementally increased in the past couple of years and if things don't improve soon, it'll take 15 years for speeds here to catch up to where South Korea is today, according to a report released today.The Speed Matters Test was administered by the Communications Workers of America and measured the speed of Internet users' connections. More than 413,00 folks took the online test between May 2008 and May 2009.The results were sobering: Just 20 percent of those who took the test have Internet speeds that measure up to the top-ranked countries: South Korea, Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands. And fully 18 percent didn't even meet the FCC definition for basic...
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Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit HMO based in California, has begun offering its Northern California members USB flash drives containing a portion of their medical records that can be carried with them on business trips and vacations. Kaiser Permanente undertook a major computerization of their medical recordkeeping in the past few years. As a member, I can attest to that. You can book appointments online (change them, even), email your physician, order prescriptions online, etc. etc. But you can't see your medical records aside from items like test results and the like. The $5 flash drive, available from any medical secretary at a Kaiser facility, doesn't hold all your records, but enough of...
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Imagine, if you will, having a basic checkup without even having to go to your doctor's office.It's not quite so extreme, but a partnership between IBM and Google makes that concept seem, perhaps, not so far-fetched. With software deveoped by IBM and Google Heath's medical record database, a patient's vital stats - heart rate, blood pressure, blood chemistry, for example - could be sent swiftly between home and the doctor's office with just the click of a button or two.The project dovetails nicely with President Obama's pledge of $20 billion in the current economic stimulus package for improving and enabling e-medical record-keeping.All this, of course, is concerning some about the privacy issues....
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