Aimed at providing diabetes sufferers a means to monitor their blood sugar, the device reads chemicals in the tear fluid of the eye and warns the wearer if the levels are abnormal via embedded LED technology within the lenses themselves. Because human tears contain a variety of inorganic electrolytes, organic solutes, proteins, and lipids, such a device would provide a convenient platform for diagnosing and/or monitoring many health-related illnesses.
It’s 2025 and you’re serving as medical officer on a crew traveling on the first manned spaceflight to Mars. You’ve trained for this mission for years, and NASA’s doctors gave you a clean bill of health before you left on the 6-month trip to the Red Planet. You wake up on day 121 of the mission with a dull pain in your stomach that over several hours becomes sharper upon palpation in the right lower quadrant. You have no appetite and are feeling nauseated. You shrug it off as being the result of the freeze-dried chili you had for dinner the night before. But later in the day, you begin vomiting and are now running a fever of 101°F.
Google Glass hasn’t really caught the attention of many people. There really isn’t much enthusiasm surrounding the project due to the awkward design and the privacy concerns surrounding it, but Google’s device does have some interesting uses. Google Glass is currently under beta testing and available through Google’s “Explorers” program, where if you are selected, you are eligible to purchase the product at a cost of $1500.
In the fictional universe of Star Trek exists a device called a VISOR. Its a thin apparatus worn like a pair of sunglasses by the blind to artificially provide them with a sense of vision. VISORs can detect electromagnetic signals and transmit them to a users brain through neural implants in their temples. However, instead of seeing the world as human eyes do, someone wearing a VISOR is able to see infrared and ultraviolet light and beyond. When the fictional technology of the VISOR was conceived, it was far from becoming a reality, but today, a device very similar to this is already being used by blind patients.
The revolutionary product comes in the form of a battery-powered headband fitted with an electrode that sends an electrical signal through the skin to the trigeminal nerve, which plays a role in many migraines. By stimulating the nerve, the device was shown to help prevent migraines in a clinical test of 67 people who previously had at least 2 migraine attacks per month. The participants wore the device for 20 minutes a day for 3 months and recorded that they took significantly less migraine medication than those who received a placebo device. A satisfaction survey of more than 2000 people in Belgium and France also showed that 53% of patients said they were happy with the headband and that they would buy one for continued use.
Smart pills are the next big thing to happen to medicine. No, taking them won’t increase your IQ, although there are many products out there that claim to do this. Smart pills are capsules or tablets embedded with some sort of tiny edible sensor that transmits information about a person’s internal body or electronically controls the delivery of medicine. According to market research, the smart pill technology market is expected to grow to almost $1 billion by the year 2017. Here’s what you need to know about the latest smart pill tech.
The human race is relatively young. The universe is estimated to be approximately 13.8 billion years old, but Homo sapiens have only been in existence for the last 200,000 years. To put that into perspective, humans are less than 0.002% the age of the universe, or rather, a blip in time. And although our species may be in its infancy, humans have already greatly advanced technologically in the short time that we have walked the earth. Once we developed a written language, we were able to begin efficiently passing on our knowledge extra-genetically from one generation to the next. It is the coalescence of this knowledge that made man into the distinguished being that he is today.
Smart phones are getting smarter all the time, but this time, they are getting healthier as well. There are more than 43,000 apps that focus on health, and heart monitoring apps are among the most popular. The new Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone even has a heart rate monitor built directly into the back of the device. Rumor has it, however, that Apple is trying to take heart monitoring to the next level by even being able to predict heart attacks with their devices. Here’s what you need to know about the latest heart monitoring smartphone tools.
Nanotechnology has the potential to change the world as we know it by transforming concepts that were once thought to be science fiction into reality. In the Star Trek universe, machines called replicators have the ability to produce practically any physical object from a new pair of boots to a slice of banana cream pie. Some experts believe that through nanotechnology, replicators can be a real possibility. Nanoparticles are already employed in some of the products we use every day. In fact, more than 2800 commercially available products are now based on nanoparticles. Many sunscreens use metal oxide nanoparticles because they efficiently protect the skin over a broader UV range.
We live in the information age. Data are at our fingertips, but efficiently locating the relevant and important data is the trick. Time spent foraging for information is time wasted. And time is inevitably something that we as human beings are always lacking. The apps suggested below are designed to help you be more efficient and are all available for both iOS and Android mobile devices.
