Who would've thought that furniture would actually no longer play dumb? That would be the case in the future if Lucas Maassen and Dries Verbruggen had their way. After all, they are the designers behind the Brainwave Sofa, where sitting on this will cause the furniture to analyze your brain activity for 3 seconds, using the extracted EEG data to create a 3D landscape on the sofa's surface which is made of of foam. Definitely not the most comfortable sofa there is, that's for sure.

In a world chock full of wireless technology, here comes the Sensium Digital Plaster which is actually a wireless monitoring patch that stays on a patient's body just like a Band Aid strip, albeit this one helps monitor the patient's vital statistics. It will be powered by extremely slim batteries, gathering information on one's heart rate, temperature and perspiration for a period of several days. Apart from that, it will also play nice with smartphones and PDAs, sending all relevant data to your physician wirelessly. Currently under clinical trial, the final product might be out sooner than you think.

The ROLA (Robot Of Living Aid) intelligent home-care robot was developed by National Chiao Tung University of Taiwan. Capable of understanding Mandarin, Taiwanese and a smattering of English, ROLA will help keep a watchful eye on elderly occupants of a home and is capable of sending distress calls automatically in the event of an accident to a family's cellphone or ambulance. This is made possible thanks to its live video feed, allowing people to tell the difference between an actual emergency and a false alarm. Measuring around $100,000, ROLA won't come cheap but hopefully with commercialization, the overall cost will be lowered.

A farming family has decided to give Meadow their calf a chance to walk normally, hence enlisted the help of veterinarians and students at Colorado State University to help her with prosthetics. This is the first calf of its kind that is believed to boast double prosthetics, where the procedure itself cost thousands of dollars. Gues this is one calf that won't end up as steak on somebody else's plate anytime soon considering the amount of investment that went into her!

Japanese eyewear company Masunaga Optical recently unveiled a new solution for video gamers as well as bookworms (and basically anyone else who are involved in activities that reduce the amount of natural blinking) - the Wink Glasses that will help reduce incidences of dry eyes. Powered by a couple of Zinc-air batteries (PR41), the Wink Glasses will turn the glass opaque by filling its sheet with a transparent liquid crystal if it detects you have not blinked in the last five seconds. A blink will reverse the situation back to normal. Expect to fork out around $170 for the Wink Glasses, where the frame itself costs another $273.

Not many people relish a trip to their dentist as that would only mean patching up some holes in your teeth while your pocket develops even larger ones. Guess they're a necessary evil, but woe to you if you need to have your gums injected with one of those terrifyingly huge syringes. The Vibringe Ultrasonic Dental Irrigation Syringe is slightly different though, targeting dental root canal procedures by using high frequency sonic vibrations to the ejected liquid, making it much more efficient at cleaning out debris from the root canal compared to traditional irrigators. Looks cool, but not too sure whether it lessens the pain or not.

Those who attended the Security & Safety Trade Expo (RISCON) in Tokyo might have caught a whiff of this special robotic patient who actually exhibits the known symptoms of the H1N1 flu virus, where it was specially developed to be a realistic training aid for medical workers. Apart from its human-like skin, the robot is also able to sweat, convulse, moan and cry tears - nice thing it does not pee.

[Web 2.0 Summit] GE Healthcare was at Web 2.0 Summit to demonstrate the Vscan scanner, an ultrasound device that can provide a picture of what's doing inside the body, in a handheld form factor. You can easily imagine how useful it can be, especially for patients who can't go to the hospital because of their conditions or because they live in remote areas. At the very least, it could be a great time saver. At the moment, the device is not available commercially in the U.S, as it is typically very long to get an FDA approval. It’s not clear if it is available elsewhere.

Biotronik's Home Monitoring device recently received the nod of approval for use in Europe, where this implantable device home monitoring system might see the end of regular visits to the clinic by patients wearing company's ICD's, CRT's and similar devices, seeing that the system is more than capable of sending readings straight from the chest to your doctor over a cellphone network. This is the first fully fully wireless, mobile remote monitoring system for patients in the world. Guess it also gives doctors a break as well, eh?

GE is a corporate giant who has its fingers dipped into most known cookie jars, so to speak, and their latest device would be the highly portable yet affordable ultrasound scanner known as the Vscan. Sharing roughly the same dimensions as a BlackBerry when closed, this device is capable of showing an ultrasound image with control keys located at the bottom. Three years ago, a console ultrasound with similar power would have cost around $250,000. Don't you just love Moore's Law at work?

Kids these days seem to be much more hyperactive and easily bored than their predecessors, and many people believe this is due to their diet which is full of sugar and empty calories apart from their conditional 'programming' by society and the media. Jesse Resnick attempts to address this issue with a new toy-like device that can grab kids' attention while limiting compulsive behavior to a short time. This Repeat device is worn on the wrist, featuring flashing rubber knobs that blink in preprogrammed patterns, where it attempts to have the child follow along with his/her fingers by pinching. How about getting a Nintendo DSi instead? That ought to help.

Brother has unveiled a smaller prototype of a retinal scanning display (RID) module that is touted to be the first in the world that utilizes green laser diodes. This new retinal scanning display module is roughly 95mm x 170mm x 30mm and tips the scales at approximately 350 grams, making it around 1/20 and 1/13 less respectively compared to its predecessor. It will not block your field of view when worn, instead functioning as projectors that use a retina as a screen. Brother has high hopes of commercializing such a retinal scanning display sometime next year to make everyone look like the Borg.

It's hard to argue that exercising is a bad thing, but it's just hard to get to it right? Philips argues that we should start small (avoid elevators, park farther away from work...) to reach a greater goal. But the smaller you start and the harder it is to measure, and if you can't measure it you won't improve it. Hence their idea of providing an activity monitor (a small, water-proof accelerometer) that records the daily small bursts of activity to generate a report. The application design is nice and seem attractive to use. Be aware that beyond the cost of the device+app, there's a fee of $12.5 per month. [Philips Directlife page]

Vicon's latest product, the ViconRevue, now comes with 1GB of internal memory that ought to be sufficient to store a whole lot of photographic stills thanks to its VGA camera sensor that shoots an image every half a minute. It won't come cheap though since they retail for £500 each, and was developed for those studying Alzheimers and dementia, although there is word of a consumer model coming out sometime next year. Guys, you had better make sure you are careful with this when peeing!