Medgadget Latest Blog Posts

ZOLL Medical Corporation has released a new iPhone application designed to help in assisting people perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Of course because it has no FDA approval ( see our recent post on the regulatory environment for mobile medical apps ), it is being marketed as a ...

Lately scientists have come upon tangible evidence that cells are able to communicate using photons instead of using chemical, mechanical, or electric means. In particular, a group from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago provided the most obvious evidence of light based communication ...

Remedium Technologies won first prize in the Most Promising Security Idea category of the Global Security Challenge 2009 for their shaving cream-like foam that can stop bleeding. The foam incorporates chitosan, a natural low-cost hemostatic substance derived from shellfish. It is designed to ...

RFID (radio frequency identification) technology has been gaining rapid adoption in gadget rich environments, such as hospitals, full of equipment that needs continuous tracking. Yet some tools, like metallic hemostats for example, are currently are not embedded with RFID chips because the ...

If humans are going to colonize space, reproducing in a zero or low gravity environment may be a necessary condition. It has been known for decades, though, that some animals fail at pregnancy while aboard orbiting spacecraft. Japanese scientists from the RIKEN Center for Developmental ...

At the 2009 congress of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago next week, Siemens will be presenting new lighting offerings for clinical settings that aim at improving patient experience. The company believes that by creating an attractive atmosphere, in contrast to the common ...

Medtronic has partnered with Vital Images out of Minnetonka, Minnesota to bring 3D reconstructions of CT images of abdominal and thoracic aorta, and other large vessels, to improve preoperative planning and operative outcome in patients that are undergoing for endovascular graft placements for ...

Patch Adams may have years of experience entertaining kids in various hospitals, but he's not a certified medical clown. He does, though, probably deserve an honorary degree from Haifa University in Israel which just announced a new three year academic program in medical clowning. Developed ...

Keeping track of blood glucose levels over time without a computer can be a challenge for your diabetic patients. Furthermore, most clinicians would rather not get a paper stack of scribbles to sift through to understand the glucose trends. On the other hand, many, especially the elderly, ...

Medical and health applications for iPhones, Blackberry devices, Android phones and other mobile gadgets already number in the thousands. The problem is that only one app, AirStrip OB , actually earned FDA's explicit blessings to be marketed as a medical device. So the big question is whether ...

In order to illustrate societal and personal expenditures that common diseases can levy, GE combined data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and its own proprietary database, and developed an interactive chart that displays diseases and what their average costs are depending on ...

Students at University of Massachusetts, Lowell developed a low cost robot arm specifically designed to open doors. They presented the DORA (Door Opening Robotic Arm) last week at the IEEE robotics conference in Woburn, Massachusetts, and the New Scientist is reporting that the device was ...

Medicare's Rules Pinching Patients ... [WSJ] U.N.: HIV Outbreak Peaked in 1996 ... [WSJ] GOP Rep. on Mammograms: "This Is How Rationing Begins"... [CBS] A difference of opinions on mammograms... [WaPo] 'Coma' man conscious for 23 years... [BBC] FDA Announces New Warning on Plavix: ...

At next week's annual RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) meeting, Diagnosoft out of Morrisville, NC and Palo Alto, CA will be showing off its new MRI technique for measuring the myocardial dynamics. The SENC method is currently available on certain Philips MRI scanners, but can be ...

The results from a three year clinical trial of Abbott 's bioabsorbable drug eluting stent are in, and they look quite promising. The first 30 patients in the phase I of the ABSORB trial demonstrated "no blood clots (stent thrombosis) and no new major adverse cardiac events after six months ...

Glowing in the dark has always been contributed to people exposed to radiation in cartoons (think Homer Simpson) and in popular myths about nuclear accidents (Chernobyl). Turns out we all glow continuously, but with a diurnal rhythm, as long as we have a powerful enough digital camera to detect ...

Boston Scientific has announced that its WallFlex® Fully Covered Esophageal Stent received 510(k) clearance from the FDA as well as EU's CE Mark of approval. The stent is designed for esophageal strictures caused by cancer of the esophagus. The use of stents can re-open a blocked ...

Though DNA inside cells gets regularly damaged, errors are typically quickly reset by a still poorly understood molecular mechanism. It has been suspected that repair enzymes actually walk the length of the DNA molecule fixing errors along the way. But the number of base pairs within each gene ...

University of Florida Researcher Huikai Xie is working on an endoscopic imaging technique using a tiny infrared scanning technology that, when placed near the surface of a tissue, moves rapidly back and forth to not only provide high resolution images of epithelial tissue, but also peer ...