Half Man, Half Machine: Real Cyborgs You Didn’t Know Existed
The Medical Bags body modification series has explored everything from permanent makeup to lip and eyelid sewing, but this edition has more of a technological twist.
The Medical Bags body modification series has explored everything from permanent makeup to lip and eyelid sewing, but this edition has more of a technological twist.
Changes in how medical diagnoses are coded under the latest international disease classification system (better known as the ICD-10 codes) may complicate the assessment of hospital safety, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Affecting roughly 9.3% of the population in 2012 and listed as the seventh leading cause of death in the US, diabetes cannot be ignored. Diabetes requires time, and close management of ones condition, to stay as healthy as possible.
Ever experience a truly surreal dream, one that is so vivid and believable that you wish you could share it with others?
Some say privacy is a luxury of the past. We live in a world where our every move is tracked online, whether its by what we are searching on Google, what were shopping for on Amazon, or whom we friends with on Facebook.
Technological advances help to improve our lives, often by increasing efficiency and reducing mishaps. The medical field, similar to NASA, has pioneered and test piloted numerous cutting-edge devices.
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.