Health Tech

Thanks to 3D-printed plastic appendages, 4.5-year-old Emma Lavelle now plays with blocks.

Born with a rare neuromuscular condition called Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita that causes contracted joints and muscle weakness, Emma has almost nonexistent biceps that cannot move against gravity. Her "magic arms," as she has dubbed them, change that.

The plastic appendages attach to a Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton (WREX) developed at the Center for Orthopedics Research and Development at Delaware's Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children. The WREX is a modular body-powered upper-limb orthosis generally mounted to a wheelchair.

"The existing WREX is all metal parts and is kind of big," Tariq Rahman, a mechanical engineer and head of pediatric engineering and research at Nemours, explains in the video below. "Emma was too small for that, so it required something light and small that would attach to her body that would go with her." … Read more

When it comes to certain diseases -- think heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers -- some basic lifestyle changes are the best preventive medicine.

And while most of us know to eat a balanced diet, exercise, and abstain from smoking, it can be far more motivating to make healthy changes if we also know we're prone to certain diseases.

Enter Zuum, a free new iPad app that estimates your risk of common diseases and personalizes tips to prevent them and improve your overall health.… Read more

If you're not afraid to swallow your technology, you may want to check out new tech cleared by the Food and Drug Administration this week that lets you ingest a digital sensor powered by stomach acid that alerts your doctors about your health and your treatment habits.

The technology consists of a tiny, silicon-based sensor that, at 1mm wide (roughly the size of a grain of sand), can be consumed via pills and pharmaceuticals and pass through the body much like high-fiber food.

According to the developer, Proteus Digital Health, once the sensor is swallowed, stomach fluids that come into contact with it provide enough power to relay a signal that documents exactly when it was taken. This data is transmitted to a battery-powered patch worn on the skin that detects the signal and records the exact time the sensor was swallowed.… Read more

High electromagnetic field levels of household appliances (such as washing machines and hair dryers) and wireless devices (such as laptops and routers) may be at least partially to blame for the rise in childhood obesity in recent years, according to a 13-year study by Kaiser Permanente that followed hundreds of pregnant women and 733 of their children.

After controlling for several factors, including child gender, pre-pregnancy BMI, maternal age at delivery, race, education, breastfeeding, and smoking, researchers write in Nature's Scientific Reports that children exposed to high in-utero levels are nearly twice as likely to be overweight or obese … Read more

Radiation exposure is an occupational hazard for cardiologists performing a procedure called percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI -- better known as angioplasty), which helps restore blood flow to blocked arteries in patients with coronary artery disease. Lead aprons help, but they're not perfect, and they're heavy enough to take a toll.

Now a new system that employs robot-assisted stent and balloon placements to restore blood flow has received FDA clearance this week. Called CorPath 200, it allows cardiologists to work from inside a lead-lined cockpit, not only minimizing their radiation exposure but also improving their view of the angiography … Read more

Last month, a paralyzed man sent his first tweet using eye movements. A new technology out of France could allow him not only to type, but to draw and sign his name in cursive on a computer.

The technique, described in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, relies on a novel head-mounted display that uses a camera to track eye movements and then relays that movement data to a computer.

Discovered by a Paris scientist studying optical illusions, the technique tricks the neuromuscular machinery into overcoming a natural phenomenon known as saccadic eye movements. … Read more

Though YouTube shouldn't exactly be your most trusted source of medical advice, in at least one case, videos on the site can help people manage a common form of vertigo without having to see a doctor, according to researchers from the American Academy of Neurology.

However, as is the case with pretty much any aggregator on the Internet (think Wikipedia), one should proceed with a healthy dose of caution, because just over half the videos are accurate -- which means, of course, that the others aren't.

The researchers who reviewed YouTube videos of the Epley maneuver, which can … Read more

All fat is not equal. Brown adipose tissue, more commonly called brown fat and abundant in both newborns and hibernating mammals, is the good fat, playing a prominent role in how quickly our bodies burn calories.

Brown fat also produces as much as 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, according to scientists at the University of Nottingham, so these scientists have developed a thermal imaging technique to measure not only a person's brown fat stores but also how much heat that fat produces.… Read more

Researchers are reporting that they have found, for the first time, that tiny electrical spinning tops ("rotors") within the heart cause atrial fibrillation (AF), a type of arrhythmia in which the heartbeat is faster and irregular.

What's more, they found that by targeting the so-called eye of the storm, they could actually slow or even terminate the AF, the multidisciplinary team from UC San Diego, UCLA, and Indiana University reports in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Today, catheter ablation is a common therapy used to treat AF, but because the … Read more