It makes me think of the riddles we used to tell in elementary school.  “I can be carried with you everywhere, used to communicate with others, used on humans and horses, and I diagnose serious cardiac problems.  What am I?”

A recent study utilizing 54 patients reveiwed the AliveCor iPhone ECG.  The iPhone ECG can be used for everything from consumer use, clinical diagnostics, to veterinary applications.

In the study, the participants were provided with a case and an app to use with their iPhone. Without receiving instructions on how to use the product, the participants were told to go and to record their ECG at least once per day.  Over the course of eight weeks, about 1500 ECGs were recorded and transmitted—about 90% of which were clinically useful.

When asked about the veterinary applications, David Albert, MD, inventor of the device and chief medical officer of AliveCor says, “I can absolutely tell you that our product from the top of the veterinary cardiology, they find it extremely useful on dogs, cats, and even horses. The iPhone ECG is going to be used by veterninarians, by electrophysiologists, cardiologists, internists, family medicine doctors, ER doctors, EMTs, paramaedics, home health nurses, medics, and then by patients themselves,” Albert adds.

Perhaps the above riddle won’t stick with someone for 35 years like my personal favorite, “What’s black and white and red all over?” (a newspaper),  but it certainly has more practical application in the real world.

If your house is like mine, and you have lots of toys laying around that your kids no longer play with, perhaps there is another option besides sending them off to Goodwill.

Jose Gomez-Marquez, director of the Director of the IIH (Innovations in International Health) Lab at MIT, is heading up MIT’s Little Devices group, dedicated to design, invention, and policy toward DIY health technologies.  Created with the healthcare needs of the developing world in mind, the MEDIKit (Medical Education Design and Invention Kit) allows medical professionals to design their own medical devices using easy-to-assemble modular components. The MEDIKit allows users to customize and quickly assemble medical devices that address the challenges of work environments in many developing nations.

MEDIKits are designed to demonstrate that such high cost equipment may be more of a luxury than a necessity by teaching medical staff to adopt other, potentially cheaper technologies to accomplish the same purpose. LEGOs can be used as breadboards to create wet lab circuits, a bicycle pump can be adapted into a nebulizer for asthmatic patients, Gomez-Marquez and his team really believe the possibilities are limited only by users’ ingenuity.

What could you design out of your children’s toys?  All it takes is a little creativity.  Look at it this way, you can either do something inventive to help humanity, or plan a garage sale, which I know I certainly don’t have the patience for.

Trekkies, rejoice! The dream of a Star Trek-style hand held medical scanner is now closer due to a new development in electromagnetic Terahertz (THz) wave technology, also known as T-rays. This technology, also seen in full-body security scanners, is currently able to detect very small and otherwise hidden biological phenomena such as increased blood flow around tumorous growths.

‘T-rays promise to revolutionize medical scanning to make it faster and more convenient, potentially relieving patients from the inconvenience of complicated diagnostic procedures and the stress of waiting for accurate results.’

Now, don’t kid yourself into thinking that this means that we will also have transporters and phasers anytime in the near future.  I suppose my dream of being able to avoid the hassles of airline travel by beaming myself to a tropical destination will have to wait for another day, although somehow, in my mind it does seem a bit more plausible.

This is a really cool example of  using technology to come up with a unique solution to a problem:

The newest prototype of the Tongue Drive System which enables quadriplegics the ability to operate wheelchairs and other devices by moving their tongues,  makes use of a dental retainer with sensors to help control the system.The embedded sensors within the retainer track the movements of a small magnet attached to the tongue.

As I survey my son’s room with the hundreds of tiny plastic pieces scattered all over and prepare to launch into my “You need to pick up your legos” diatribe, the last thing on my mind is usually medical device product development, but perhaps I will see things differently from now on.

Max Shepherd developed and built the 12 degree of freedom prosthetic arm from Lego components as a means to accurately mimic the full range of motion of a normal human arm and hand. The hand movements are powered using Lego pneumatics while the wrist pronation/supination, wrist flexion/extension, and elbow flexion/extension are powered by Lego motors.

Does this make me feel any better about the plastic parts that seem to find their way over every inch of my house, making it a mine field to anyone trying to navigate it in bare feet, especially in the dark?  Not really…