Thanks to technology, our smartphones have come a very long way from being just a device that can make phone calls, send emails, play music, and surf the web. These days our smartphones are becoming increasingly competent where they are being used in the medical field as ultrasound scanners and also as tools to help detect Alzheimer’s.
There is the saying that claims that prevention is better than cure. Basically, the idea is that if you can prevent something from happening to you, it would be better than trying to fix it. This is especially true when it comes to our health, where there might be certain instances in which a cure won’t always return you back to the way you were before.
We all know how satisfying it can be to crack your neck after a long day’s work. However, the next time you reach over to your neck to give it a good crack, you might want to think twice and maybe not use so much force. This is because a 28-year old man by the name of Josh Hader suffered a stroke after cracking his neck too hard.
We’ve always known that drones could be used for delivery purposes, where in some countries such a in Australia, we’ve seen how drones are being used to deliver coffee. In fact, it had also been suggested that drones could also potentially be used to deliver organs in instances where emergency transplants had to be done.
Like a lot of medical conditions, early detection can either help to cure the problem, or it could help patients deal with the issue a lot earlier which can also help improve their overall quality of life. We’ve seen how some researchers are trying to find ways of detecting Alzheimer’s early, and now a new study has suggested that maybe a video game could actually do a much better job.
On iOS devices, Apple has the Health app which allows users to track their health-related data collected from apps and devices like the Apple Watch. Google also has a similar health app in the form of Google Fit which was for Android devices, but now it looks like iOS users who want to use Google Fit will be able to do so.
One of the problems experienced by those who are disabled is being able to effectively communicate with other people around them. For example, we have seen how this can involve the use of computers and having to type out things that they want to say. Now thanks to the efforts of researchers at UC San Francisco, they might have come up with something better.
Personal ECG devices can only detect just one kind of heart arrhythmia which is atrial fibrillation. That’s helpful in most cases but it doesn’t provide coverage for the other conditions which could prove to be just as dangerous. The FDA has now handed out its first clearance for a device that can detect three heart arrhythmias.
For those living in developed countries, sometimes we can take certain health care facilities for granted where they are typically stocked with your basic machinery and equipment. However, in more rural parts of the world, accessing such equipment can be near impossible, but it seems that technology has created some innovative solutions.
If you’re someone who suffers from adverse allergic reactions, like to peanuts or bee-stings, for example, then having an EpiPen on your person could be the difference between life and death. Unfortunately, these devices aren’t the easiest to carry around, meaning that you could lose them, or if they’re in a bag, they might be difficult to find.
From time to time, we hear about patients who are technically alive but are considered brain dead. Given that the brain pretty much controls our entire body, there’s not much that can be done, or at least that’s what we used to think until researchers at Yale University have managed to restore some function to the brains of dead pigs, according to a study published in Nature.
Curing heart disease can be tricky because in some cases, the only way for a person to survive would be to get a heart transplant. Unfortunately, finding a suitable donor is difficult, not to mention there is a waiting list as well, and there are also complications with regards to the body accepting the new organ.
The problem with most prosthetics is that they can be expensive, not to mention that they also don’t look particularly interesting. However, the latter is more of a design choice where function is usually chosen over form, but that’s where a company by the name of Open Bionics made a name for themselves.