Anatomy Of A Handheld Hospital

1 Processor that can power a pacemakerSmartphones run superfast (in excess of 1 GHz) without consuming much power, much like top-notch pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators.

2 Display that can assess an ultrasoundThe iPhone 4S's resolution (300 pixels per inch) is on par with most hospital-grade ultrasound monitors, and small screen size won't matter once projection tech takes off.

3 Camera that can capture cellsThe HD video camera, which shoots 30 frames per second, is more advanced than some of the ones in colonoscopes, which doctors use to seek out potentially cancerous tissue.

4 Accelerometer that can guide physical therapyThe three-axis accelerometer captures the same subtle movements--tilts, shocks, rotations--as APDM motion sensors, which are used to monitor patients' Parkinson's disease and help them through physical therapy.

5 Microphone that can hear your heartBecause of its flat-frequency response rate--which drastically reduces noise distortion--a smartphone mic (with help from an amplifying attachment) can detect a heartbeat almost as well as a $500 electronic stethoscope.

Smartphones Get Smarter, You May Get Healthier

As Smartphones Get Smarter, You May Get Healthier: How mHealth Can Bring Cheaper Health Care To All

By: Adam Bluestein

Smartphones and tablets are transforming the future of health care. Can we really trust them to save lives?

The average auto refractor--that clunky-looking device eye doctors use to pinpoint your prescription--weighs about 40 pounds, costs $10,000, and is virtually impossible to find in a rural village in the developing world. As a result, some half a billion people are living with vision problems, which make it tough to read and work.

Ramesh Raskar knew fixing this problem would be tricky. It required a new way of thinking about eye tests--and a new kind of device, one powerful enough to support high-resolution visuals, cheap enough to scale, and simple enough to be used by just about anyone. The MIT professor briefly toyed with stand-alone options, which were complicated and costly. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an unexpected savior: his iPhone.

"The displays had gotten so good, thanks to people wanting to watch episodes of Lost in high definition," Raskar recalls. "I was immediately energized."

By creating an app and attachment for the popular smartphone, Raskar could tap into a huge existing user base and skirt millions in distribution and manufacturing costs. The result: a plastic clip-on eyepiece that uses an on-screen visual test to determine a patient's "refractive error" (a number doctors then use to dole out prescriptions). When his startup, EyeNetra, begins market testing later this year in Brazil, India, and Mexico--and eventually in the U.S.--its tech will deliver all the functionality of an optometrist's costly machine for less than $30

This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of "mHealth," the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that's fast becoming ubiquitous--two in three people worldwide own a cell phone--a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it's cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile. "It's like the human body has developed a new organ," says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they'll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson's disease, and even alerting you when it's prime time to make a baby.

At stake is the future of health care--and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today's mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care. "Why prescribe a $1,000 test in the hospital when all you need is a heart rate?" asks Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist who heads the University of Southern California's Center for Body Computing. With inexpensive new technology, she notes, "I could tell a patient to go to the drugstore and buy an ECG [electrocardiogram] sensor for her phone."

But can we really trust our phones to dispense medical data? That's the question facing the FDA, which has spent the past year or so putting pioneering mHealth products through rigorous evaluations. "We had to show that our phone-computing platform and display quality were on par with existing devices," says Sailesh Chutani, CEO of Mobisante, whose ultrasound attachment was sanctioned in January--after about a year of costly back-and-forth. With this first wave of devices approved and a mobile-specific set of guidelines to be finalized later this year, the FDA expects to streamline its approval process, which should juice the mHealth market. "Regulatory clarity almost always drives investment--provided it's not a big, clear no," says Joseph Smith, who helps run the West Wireless Health Institute.

Whether these tools actually make us any healthier, however, will depend on how we use them. Given the ability to record our snacks, thoughts, naps, movements, and more, "we will be overwhelmed with data," warns John Moore, a lead researcher in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab. "We need a holistic vision to make it all meaningful and motivating." Among other advances, that vision will require a seamless flow of data across myriad devices and platforms--think how the MP3 format transformed the music industry--and a physicians' movement to adopt electronic medical records. (Right now, only a third of them have.) And even then, there's no guarantee these tools will change behavior. Will we stop eating sugary foods? Or, as Smith wonders, will we just be staring curiously at "phones that show glucose readings in three colors"? Corporate titans are racing to find out. Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest medical-device maker, recently invested in sleep-monitoring technology from Zeo, a Massachusetts-based startup. Best Buy is funding earbuds that can monitor your heart rate. AT&T helped seed an employee-wellness program with WellDoc, whose apps help users manage diabetes, among other conditions. And Qualcomm, the renowned chipmaker, just launched a subsidiary that's helping to develop all kinds of mHealth devices. "Will this nascent technology attract consumers, health-care providers, and health-care payers?" says Don Jones, a VP at Qualcomm. "The entire world is keeping its fingers crossed."

Aug. 23, 1899: First Ship-to-Shore Signal to a U.S. Station

1899: The first ship-to-shore wireless message in U.S. history is sent by Lightship No. 70 to a coastal receiving station at the Cliff House in San Francisco.

“Sherman is sighted,” the message said, referring to the troopship Sherman, which was returning a San Francisco regiment from the battlefields of the Spanish-American War. It marked the first use outside England of this technology, still in its infancy.

The name most closely associated with the invention of wireless telegraphy — what we now know simply as radio — is Guglielmo Marconi, but as with so many technologies, there were a number of hands stirring the pot, chief among them Heinrich Hertz, Alexander Popov and Nicola Tesla. Marconi’s claim to primacy was no doubt helped by the fact that he obtained the British patent for wireless in 1896, when Britannia still ruled the waves.

Radio communication at sea quickly evolved into an indispensable safety aid for mariners. By the early 20th century ships were able to communicate with each other as well as with shore-based stations. The Japanese navy used radio communication to scout the Russian fleet during the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, a crushing Japanese victory and a turning point in the Russo-Japanese War.

The failure of radio communication played a major role in the Titanic disaster in 1912. The lone radio operator aboard the Californian had switched off his set for the night (as was common aboard vessels carrying a single operator) and never received the Titanic‘s distress signals. Had someone been at his post, the Californian — by far the closest ship to the stricken liner — could have arrived soon enough to save many of the lives that were lost.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz celebrated

German physicist, whose experiments led to the wireless telegraph and the radio, has his 155th birthday marked

The Guardian

 

 

 

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the German physicist, has his 155th birthday celebrated in a new Google doodle. Photograph: Screengrab

Google's latest animated doodle celebrates the 155th birthday of Heinrich Hertz, the German physicist whose experiments with electromagnetic waves led to the development of the wireless telegraph and the radio.

Born in Hamburg, where he demonstrated great skill in grasping the dynamics of physics even in boyhood, he later enrolled to study the subject in Berlin following a year at the University of Munich.

In Berlin, his progress in investigating electromagnetic phenomena was so rapid that in February 1880 he received his PhD – on electromagnetic induction in rotating spheres – at the age of 22.

After becoming a professor at Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule in 1885, Hertz turned his attentions to open electrical circuits and demonstrated electromagnetic induction to his students using a condenser discharging through an open loop.

In the course of doing this, he noticed an unanticipated phenomenon, the emergence of 'side-sparks' in another nearby loop. By 1888, he was able to demonstrate that the electromagnetic emissions associated with these sparks behaved like waves.

The finding, which effectively clarified and expanded the electromagnetic theory of light that had been put forth by the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1884, was hailed as confirmation that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted and received.

Hertz's name later became the term used for radio and electrical frequencies, as in hertz (Hz), kilohertz (kHz) and megahertz (MHz).

He died in Bonn in 1894 after contracting Wegener's granulomatosis, a rare disorder in which blood vessels become inflamed, and was buried in Ohlsdorf, Hamburg.

An update for Adobe's Flash Media Server

Adobe has released a new update for its "Flash Media Server", version 4.5. It was an opportunity for AEG Digital Media, a specialist in webcast and media services for live streaming events, to team up with Adobe for its promotional campaign. In a mini-reportage, we see their technical teams working at full tilt; we clearly appreciate the levels of stress inherent in their work!

The vice president of AEG Digital Media admitted that his company was pulling out all the stops to ensure reliable and high quality production across all new media. To achieve this, it is obviously essential to be able to rely on technology as robust as that offered by Adobe's "Flash Media Server".

And the cherry on the cake: this update means content in Flash format will be viewable on iPhones and iPads. About time too!Provided by YC/ATC-TCL.com

Yahoo! net income dives on sinking revenue

Struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! reported Tuesday that third quarter net profit dove 26 percent from a year earlier as revenue sank.

Yahoo! had net earnings of $293 million on revenue of $ 1.072 billion in the quarter to September 30, compared with $396 million in profit on $1.124 billion in revenue in the same period last year.

"We're pleased that revenue, operating income and EPS (earnings per share) were all above consensus this quarter," said interim Yahoo! chief executive Tim Morse.

"My focus, and that of the whole company, is to move the business forward with new technology, partnerships, products, and premium personalized content -- all with an eye toward growing monetization," he said.

Yahoo!'s stock price climbed more than three percent to $15.97 per share in after-hours trade following the report, which beat Wall Street expectations.

Vodafone 'considers' offer for Cable & Wireless

Mobile phone giant Vodafone said on Monday it was considering an offer for Cable & Wireless Worldwide, the global telecoms company set up in the 1860s to run the British empire's communications network.

In a regulatory statement issued in response to press speculation about a deal, Vodafone said it "regularly reviews opportunities in the sector and confirms that it is in the very early stages of evaluating the merits of a potential offer for CWW".

Vodafone, with operations around the world, said there was "no certainty that an offer will be made nor as to the terms on which any offer might be made".

"Any offer, if made, will be in cash but Vodafone reserves the right to change the (terms) ... A further announcement will be made in due course, if appropriate."

Under British regulations, Vodafone must make its intentions clear as to an offer by March 13.

Press reports at the weekend said the deal could be worth some £700 million (836 million euros, $1.14 billion).

Cable & Wireless was involved from the start in the laying of submarine cables around the world which linked the outposts of the British empire as it expanded in the 19th century.