High levels of pollution may have contributed to the deaths of thousands of people in England from pneumonia in recent years, a study suggests.

A team at the University of Birmingham examined death rates from the disease and pollution levels in 352 local authorities between 1996 and 2004.

Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, they reported a “strong correlation” between the two.

But the researchers conceded that social factors may also be at play.

Calculations were made by looking at how many deaths there were in each locality in excess of the national average.

These figures were then cross-checked with a range of pollutant levels, including engine exhaust emissions.

Read more.

Though he claims he never had allergies before moving here to my hometown 10 years ago, my husband came home after a recent allergy test with a sheet filled with items that he reacted to. While I doubt all of his allergies cropped up in the last decade, I do know that our area is bad for people who suffer respiratory illnesses. Though we have no intentions of moving, if we ever do, air quality will definitely be on my list of things to consider.

The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America recently named the worst cities for allergy sufferers in America. They ranked their cities by pollen counts, medication usage, and the number of board certified allergists per patient.

The top five include:

• Lexington, KY
• Greensboro, NC
• Johnson City, TN
• Augusta, GA
• Jackson, MS

From That’s Fit.

NewScientistTech reports on a device that can record and play back smells, just as easily as a voice recorder can playback sounds…
The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis…

Somboon’s system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon. “We can even tell a green apple from a red apple,” Somboon says.

From medGadget

An electronic device may help ‘zap’ away migraine pain before it starts, US research suggests. The hand-held device creates a short-lived electromagnetic field which ‘interrupts’ the migraine. At the American Headache Society meeting researchers said the device was effective in treating nausea, noise and light sensitivity.

UK experts said the findings were interesting but warned it needed to be tested in a much larger study.
People who suffer from migraine headaches often describe seeing showers of shooting stars, zigzagging lines and flashing lights, and experiencing loss of vision, weakness, tingling or confusion.  These neural disturbances or ‘auras’ signal the onset of migraine headaches.

The device, called TMS, delivers a strong electric current through a metal coil, which creates an intense magnetic field for about one millisecond.  The theory is that the electrical charge interrupts the aura phase of the migraine before it leads to headaches. In 23 patients who were treated with the TMS device, 69% reported to have either no or mild pain two hours after treatment compared with 48% of the placebo group. 42% of the TMS-treated patients graded their lack of symptoms as very good or excellent compared to 26% for placebo.

Read more from The BBC

A portable scanning device that reads text to visually impaired people will go on sale in the UK next month for £2,625.

Called the K-NFB, it is the latest product to be developed by American inventor Raymond Kurzweil.

Until now, scanning and text-to-speech output meant having to take the printed material to the hardware.

The K-NFB, which combines a PDA and a digital camera, means that people will be able to read menus, train timetables and product labels in shops.

Read full article

Mr. Hiroyuki, from the biological signal processing laboratory at NTT DoCoMo in Japan, presented the most interesting innovantion at CHI06 in my opinion. It is an EOG eye tracker that is integrated with a normal set of headphones. You record your eye movements in real life without any mirrors in front of you (which is normally an obstacle when you do mobile gaze tracking). The EOG-sensors just picks up small changes in electrical potentials made by the eyes when moving. Notice the stereo cameras on each earphone.

Read it here

A legally blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a “seeing machine” that allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit.

The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person’s eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures.

“The advantage of this kind of display is there’s no extraneous stuff in your peripheral vision that gets in the way,” Elizabeth Goldring, who has published three volumes of poetry, said in an interview. “The image gets projected right onto the retina.”

The device, which Goldring calls a “seeing machine,” is housed in a box that measures about 12 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches.

The seeing machine is not wearable and would not allow one to easily navigate through a crowded, unfamiliar space. But it helps a user study a color image, such as printed words, pictures of people or room layouts. It only works for people with some living retina cells and a completely blind person would not be able to use the device.

Read more

This technology, which is being studied by a couple researchers in Nebraska, would give a robot a human-like sense of touch.

In other words, the point is to create a robotic hand that is sensitive to and can react to different grooves or bumps in an object. The Nebraskan researchers said one hope is to robotically perform minimally invasive surgery.

Read here

Yes, frikkin’ lasers! After years of watching dermatologists have all the fun, someone found a use for lasers in the ED (and, really, the rest of the hospital).

Apparently, using a handheld laser over the planned IV site will ablate the topmost layer of skin, allowing transdermal anesthetics to seep though. Patients reported less pain in this randomized controlled trial (the patients and researchers were also blinded, though it’s not clear whether it was by design protocol, or from the power of the lasers).

More here

The Home Office is under fire for allowing foreign agencies access to the National DNA Database (NDNAD).

Following the news two weeks ago that the ID card database will be shared, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokeswoman Lynne Featherstone asked in parliament whether foreign law enforcement can already access DNA data. Home Office minister Joan Ryan confirmed that since 2004 they had received 519 requests for UK DNA data from abroad. No records are available from before that time, she added.

Read more

This hood is designed for children of 3 to 8 years old. The kit protects the head and the respiratory system. It is comfortable to wear and allows a wide field of vision. The kit includes a blower airflow unit, which creates positive pressure thus preventing contaminated air from entering the hood.

Supplied with a drinking tube and powered by 4 x 123A (3v.) Lithium batteries. Supplied in an easy to carry case with a handle and shoulder strap.

More

Virgin Atlantic will be installing telemedicine devices on their entire fleet. The devices called Tempus, produced by Remote Diagnostic Technologies, is for use by non-medical personnel to take a patient’s vitals and communicate via satellite with doctors on the ground.

Tempus uses the satellite technology that operates Virgin Atlantic’s onboard telephone system to transmit medical information such as pulse rate and blood pressure readings as well as video images to medical experts at the MedAire Centre in Phoenix, Arizona. The ground-based doctors can then diagnose the problem and advise the crew on the next course of action, enabling crew to use their medical training to assist the passenger.

Steve Ridgway, chief executive of Virgin Atlantic, welcomed the introduction of the technology;
“The safety and welfare of our passenger is of paramount importance. Virgin Atlantic has used the original telemedicine system, MedLink, for many years, but Tempus’ advanced technology significantly increases the airline’s onboard medical provision.”

I wonder if on-flight medical exams are a perk for first class flyers or if there will be a bill waiting for them at home from the doctor.

Read more

Your Bluetooth-enabled PC or handset will soon be able to do more than just stream audio and sync data, as the SIG responsible for the wireless protocol has announced a forthcoming profile that will enable pairing with health and fitness monitoring equipment. Although several proprietary monitoring solutions are already on the market, the so-called Medical Device Profile will allow third-party manufacturers to release hardware with guaranteed interoperability, which should help grow this nascent use of the technology. Scheduled for completion sometime during the first half of next year, the new profile will allow users to both track pertinent statistics on their Bluetooth devices and easily send that data to doctors, coaches, or trainers. Luckily for us heavy Bluetooth users, the profile will also be compatible with the upcoming Ultra Wideband (UWB) standard, meaning that the fitness-related bits traveling to our smartphone won’t have to fight for bandwidth with the tethered GPS receiver and A2DP tunes we rock during our workouts.

Link

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as DARPA (you know, they created that thing which allows you to read this site — the internet?), has tasked scientists with the goal of creating a bionic arm that looks, feels ,and works like a real arm by the year 2009. The $55 million project to be managed by the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore consists of dozens of teams of biologists, physicists and electronic engineers from both government, university and private organizations, each of which will design and construct sample arms, with one or more of the wining designs is then hoped to go into clinical testing on patients in 2009. Current plans range from arms that are controlled using an implantable device, to arms that are controlled by the nerves in the amputated area, to arms that would receive signals directly from the person’s brain. If all the goals of the program are met, the bionic arm would be able to perform tasks as minute as buttoning a shirt button, and even provide sensory feedback.

Link

We’re sure that more than a few of our readers are keen on robots and interested in the latest developments in robotics, but how many of you would volunteer to be the guinea pig for the world’s first unassisted heart surgery? Even though there were about a million doctors on hand to monitor Dr. Carlo Pappone’s robosurgeon doing its detailed work on a 34-year-old Italian patient suffering from atrial fibrillation (heart flutters), we can’t help but wonder if a juxtaposed “0″ and “1″ in the bot’s code is all it would take to drive a scalpel somewhere that it isn’t supposed to go. Luckily for the pioneering patient, the 50-minute surgery went off without a hitch, most likely due to the fact that the prototype bot has software containing data about some 10,000 real-world operations, and has already performed assisted procedures on at least 40 people. Pappone, who initiated and monitored the latest surgery from a computer in Boston while it was occurring in Milan, plans to release a commercial version of the unnamed robosurgeon later this month.