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Sleep Buster: Japanese Company Develops Anti-Sleep Driver Seat Sheet

Posted: 02 Jan 2012 05:14 AM PST

juki feat

There are quite a few systems and gadget on the market already that prevent people from falling asleep whilst driving, but Japan-based Juki has developed an entirely new one: a sheet [JP, PDF] that can be mounted on the driver’s seat and triggers an alarm when you’re about to doze off.

The way the so-called Sleep Buster works is that it measures signals from the heart and aorta through a built-in sensor. A piece of software called “Human Tachometer” then visualizes the condition of the driver on a controller: apart from fatigue or drowsiness, users can also check their level of concentration or how distracted they are, for example.

Juki says the Sleep Buster measures the driver’s bio signals every 18 seconds and can warn drivers about 10 minutes before they fall asleep – enough time to find a place to rest (and to prevent possible accidents).

Juki plans to start selling the Sleep Buster next month (price in Japan: US$2,000 – including the sheet, controller, and a power module). The company is also active in the US but hasn’t said yet whether the device will be sold outside Japan, too.

Via Asiajin



Gadgets Week in Review: New To You

Posted: 02 Jan 2012 01:00 AM PST

6 Big HealthTech Ideas That Will Change Medicine In 2012

Posted: 01 Jan 2012 06:57 PM PST

HealthTech

“In the future we might not prescribe drugs all the time, we might prescribe apps.” Singularity University‘s executive director of FutureMed Daniel Kraft M.D. sat down with me to discuss the biggest emerging trends in HealthTech. Here we’ll look at how A.I, big data, 3D printing, social health networks and other new technologies will help you get better medical care. Kraft believes that by analyzing where the field is going, we have the ability to reinvent medicine and build important new business models.

For background, Daniel Kraft studied medicine at Stanford and did his residency at Harvard. He’s the founder of StemCore systems and inventor of the MarrowMiner, a minimally invasive bone marrow stem cell harvesting device. The following is rough transcript of the 6 big ideas Kraft outlined for me at the Practice Fusion conference

Artificial Intelligence

Siri and IBM’s Watson are starting to be applied to medical questions. They’ll assist with diagnostics and decision support for both patients and clinicians. Through the cloud, any device will be able to access powerful medical AI.

For example, an X-ray gun in remote africa could send shots to the cloud where an artificial intelligence augmented physician could analyze them. Pap smears and some mammograms are already read with some AI or elements of pattern recognition.

This has the potential to disintermediate some fields of medicine like dermatology which is a pattern based field — I look at the rash and I know what it is. Soon every primary care doctor is going to have an app on their phone that can send photos to the cloud. They’ll be analyzed by AI and determine “oh that mole looks like a dangerous melanoma” or “it’s normal”. So the referral pattern to the dermatologist will slow down.

On the plus side, there are consumer apps like Skin Scan where for $5 you can take a picture of lesion and send it to the cloud, and it will at least give you an idea if it’s dangerous or not. If it is, it can help you find a nearby doctor, which could help dermatologists get more business. Many fields are going to change because of artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and cheaper tests.

Big Data

We’re gaining the ability to get more and more data at lower and lower price points. The primary example is the human genome and genomic sequencing. It cost a billion dollars or more 10 years ago to get a complete human sequence. However, the cost and speed of getting that data has dropped faster than Moore’s law to the point where it’s less than $5,000 when ordered online. From 23andMe you can now get a cheap snip test, and it has a pilot program for $999 for a whole exam.

Maybe there were 10,000 patients sequenced last year. Next year it could be 100,000 and soon millions. A genome sequence could be the cost of a blood count today.  When that information becomes queryable in an a crowdsourced and cloudsourced way we can be more predictive about what you’re more likely to get based on your genomics. You can then take preventative steps or get screened more often.

So we’re pulling in huge data sets from low-cost genomics to proteomics (analyzing the proteins in the blood) to quantifiable self. The challenge is to make sense of that data and make it actionable information without making the patient or doctor overwhelmed.

I think we need to make smart dashboards like they have for fighter pilots. They would piece together data from ubiquitous sensors, like those made by GreenGoose, and Microsoft Kinect that can measure your activity around the house. It would be like the OnStar for your body that could give you clues about when you’re about to get in trouble, and it could call for help or guide you to appropriate therapy.

3D Printing

3D printing has been around for a while but now it’s being applied to medicine in ways such as being able to scan the remaining leg of a patient that’s missing one from an accident. It can then build a prosthetic leg with skin and size that matches. 3D printing is integrating with the fast-moving world of stem cells and regenerative medicine with 3D ink being replaced by stem cells. In the future we’ll probably use 3D printing and stem cells to make libraries of replacement parts. It will start with simple tissues and eventually maybe we’ll be printing organs.

Social Health Network

Social networks have the ability to change our behavior. When you wireless weight scale shares metrics with your friends, you get praised for success and pressured if you’re not maintaining your diet. Social networks are also quite powerful for tracking and predicting disease. James Fowler, co-author of the book Connected is now working with Facebook to look at health data. Not surprisingly, the more friends you have, the earlier in the flu season you’ll get influenza. This could help predict when you’ll get the flu and let you take steps to avoid it.

We’re in the Facebook era, and are more open to sharing information in the healthcare spectrum. Individuals will share their whole history through services including PatientsLikeMe and CureToegether where patients with similar problems from migraines to Lou Geghrig’s disease will consolidate health information. This will enable improvements in clinical trials.

Genomera is trying allow for low-cost web-based clinical trial around any question. Practice Fusion can also crowdsource that data from its electronic medical records. By collecting data from all the patients within a hospital or a region you can see trends and almost run clinical studies on the fly. For example you could see all the patients that have this gene and that are taking this drug, and determine if that drug is effective for them or not.

Communication With Doctors

New communication platforms similar to a Skype or FaceTime will help you communicate differently with your clinician. Many of these things are basically already here. The challenge is often not the technology but the regulatory and reimbursement markets around them. If you’re going to be talking with your clinician on your iPhone you may need to do that in a HIPAA privacy protected way. The physician is also going to want to be paid for that in some way. They’re not going to want to get all your data every time you have a hiccup or look at your iPhone pictures of your rash unless there’s a way to get paid.

The regulatory system needs to adapt towards to becoming Accountable Care Organizations, which reward clinicians and healthcare plans for keeping patients healthy opposed to paying them to do extra procedures. This contrasts with a model of paying them for service like putting in stents and doing things after a problem has already progressed. Incentives need to be aligned and reimbursement needs to change to enable some of these new technologies to actually enter the clinic.

Mobile

The ability to have your phone tie to your healthcare record and track medical metrics will have vast repercussions. Though some aren’t cleared for sale in US yet, devices like the Alivecor electrocardiogram can monitor your heart in realtime, send the data to the cloud, and allow your cardiologist to look at it instantly. Other devices are turning phones into otoscopes for looking in your ears, or glucometers for monitoring blood sugar.

Quantified self devices like the Fitbit, Jawbone Up, and more medically themed devices will take what you used to do dsin a clinic or hospital and bring it home. This will allow therapies to be tuned much more effectively than scribbling data on a piece of paper and bringing it in to your doctor months later.

Eventually these devices will converge into the equivalent of Star Trek tricorder that can perform a wide variety of medical functions. There’s even an $10 million X Prize proposed to reward the inventor of the first functional tricorder.

Unfortunately, the strict regulatory system and entrenched, interested of the United States are pushing innovation offshore. A lot of the work for using mobile phones for health care is happening in Africa and India. Since there are few physicians in some of these areas mobile health and telemedicine are taking off. For example, microfluidics allows multiple tests to be done on a small chip at pennies per test, with the ability to connect to the web for analysis. The US will need to find a way to solve these regulatory problems while keeping patients safe, otherwise jobs and revenue could slip abroad.

To learn more about what’s happening next in healthtech, check out Singularity University’s FutureMed 2020 program, watch Daniel Kraft’s Ted Talk, and browse our healthtech channel.

[Image Credits: Guiacirugiaestetica.com, shopping.com]



Tech Comes To The Real World

Posted: 01 Jan 2012 02:00 PM PST

realworld

2011 saw many interesting developments in the virtualization of goods. The growth of app stores continued unabated, aided by huge sales of iOS devices and Android handsets, and media of all kinds continued the move to a totally non-physical state for the end user: Netflix, Spotify, and other services make the idea of storing your things, whether on your hard drive or in stacks by the TV, seem very… 2010. Widespread adoption of non-physical media is sparking new industries and setting fire to old ones.

But we also are seeing increasing frustration with the limitation of our digital acts to affecting digital things, and vice versa. The cutting edge of technology seems to be confined to the borders of our screens. People don’t freak out about the Nest or the Little Printer because they’re really such revolutionary devices – they aren’t. People are excited because these things portend the fulfillment of the promise technology has unwittingly made: that it will change the way we live, not just the way we consume.

Because as much as the media we consume entertains and to an extent defines us, it is only one facet of how we live, yet the delivery mechanisms of these media have borne the great majority of visible improvements in the internet and mobile revolution. What has been left behind? The way we create things, move and adjust things in “real life,” the way we interact with each other outside of our devices, the way we cook and sleep and run. Some small advances have been made here (things like Nike+ cross over, and the popularization of photo and location sharing apps to some extent), but how far have, say, refrigerators, or beds, come in the last ten years – compared with the way we experience music, or keep in touch with our friends?

This order of things was inevitable: naturally, there are some things that will be more easily and fundamentally changed by the addition of mobiles and broadband, media delivery among them. You wouldn’t expect baby carriages to be leading the charge of connected devices. Yet why shouldn’t your perambulator record the distance it travels, track the weight of the child, network with other nearby prams to determine parental hot spots? Such things sound frivolous, but frivolity makes up the majority of our application of tech, and the more we use it, the more indispensable it becomes. A digital compass on your phone, for instance. A novelty at first, but after a few years, a standard part of the modern tech-user’s toolkit.

For many, it smacks of excess, of tacky Skymall Frankendevices for the lazy and easily distracted. But it’s just the next step in the dance we’ve all been doing since we got our first modems. Breathing the principle of interconnectedness into things for which the benefits of doing so are not obvious is creating a new class of devices, and we crave them because our experience of technology is so limited.

This isn’t to say that tweeting microwaves are to deliver us from an evil prison of consumption-oriented technology. It’s just that the future is, and always has been, banal. The leading edge of tech is an exciting place, but the trailing edge cuts a wider swath. The Jetsons had flying cars, sure, but they also had space-age plant pots and dog collars.

The next year will have more of the same stuff, of course: bigger TVs, cooler tablets and phones, and increasing capacity for everything, everywhere. But it also will showcase the quieter, more wide-reaching changes that come when these new capabilities begin to infiltrate the vast empire of banality. And in a few years, when your oven messages you to say the roast has reached 160 degrees, or the shower recognizes your face and adjusts the temperature accordingly, you will wonder how you ever lived without it. And this miracle oven will be more relevant to many millions of people than, say, the empowerment of the oppressed and destitute to communicate freely or access the knowledge of the ages. No, it’s not pretty; it’s progress. And we’ll be seeing a lot of it.



It’s 2012 Already So Where Are All The Jetsons Flying Cars

Posted: 01 Jan 2012 01:39 PM PST

the jetsons

As we enter 2012, shouldn’t we all be traveling around in flying cars by now? That was the prediction in the Jetsons cartoon tv show. The futuristic series, first produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1962, was set in 2062, exactly 50 years from today. 2012 is the halfway point, so we’ve still got some time before we are all driving around in flying cars. But, many other technology advances from the Jetsons are already with us.

The Jetsons represented an optimistic view of technology and the future. As Jeffrey Tucker writes, “it was neither utopian nor dystopian” and “technology was the best (but of course it still malfunctions, same as today.)”

The Jetsons was created at a time almost technologically unimaginable today. Television was still partly black and white. The Jetsons was the first program to be broadcast by ABC in color. No personal computers, no cell phones, and of course, no Internet. But, let’s see how well some of the Jetsons vision of the future has worked out so far.

The flying car: The design of the Jetsons flying car was inspired by a 1954 Ford concept car, the FX-Atmos, notable for its all-glass bubble canopy, dashboard radar screen and jet-plane-like tail fins. We are not quite there, but the car/plane called Transition, made by Terrafugia, made its debut flight 2 years ago.

There have been dozens of other flying cars built, but most people have never seen one overhead. While George Jetson actually drove/flew his car, we do have Google’s self driving car.

RUDI, George’s “Referential Universal Digital Indexer” work computer: We have Yahoo, “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” and the digital index that is Google. And we also can ask questions and get answers from Siri.

Video Chat: George would see and speak with his boss and family from this screen. We have lots of that including Skype video calls, Google+ Hangouts, Cisco TelePresence and many more.

The Televiewer: At home, George could read the news off this screen. In the 1960s, this was a strange concept to actually get information off a screen. Now, it’s the primary way.

George Jetsons’ 3 hours a day, 3 days a week workweek: Tim Ferris has already achieved that and more with his popular book, The 4-Hour Workweek.

George’s job is pushing buttons: In the original 1960s episodes, George’s work involves pushing buttons, knobs, dials, and switches. More episodes were made in the 1980s, and George’s desk was upgraded to flat buttons and brightly lit consoles. While not quite a console, how many of us push buttons on a keyboard all day?

Spacely Space Sprockets: Forbes magazine jokingly valued Spacely Sprockets at $1.3 billion, on their “The 25 Largest Fictional Companies” list. Apple’s market cap is around $376 billion today.

Robot Vacuum Cleaner: iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Rosey, the household robot: TechCrunch wrote about the ReadyBot in 2008, a robot that picks up toys and empties trash. There’s also a slight resemblance to the Anybots robot.

Didi, Judy’s digital diary: Judy’s diary was private, so this analogy isn’t perfect, but now Judy might share information about her life on Facebook. There are also many private diary diary applications.

Moving walkways: Moving walkways are pretty common at airports, but not as widespread as they were in the Jetsons world. But, this proposed moving Chinese bus that lets traffic pass underneath seems right at home in that world.

Mr. Spacely tells George Jetson “You’re Fired”: No need to explain where we’ve all heard that one before.

A big part of future technology that the Jetsons totally missed is emailing and texting. Perhaps by 2062 those forms of communication won’t exist.

For more, PhoneTVInternet.com has a list of 10 comparisons between the Jetsons and Modern Technology.



Weekly Wrist Watch Round Up

Posted: 01 Jan 2012 12:46 PM PST

Seamaster-moon-650

The famous and very iconic Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch get’s “Watch What-Iffed” using Photoshop to explore what variations on the core design would look like.

A new analog & digital combination watch for pilots was just announced by Hamilton called the Khaki Flight Timer. It has loads of features in a conservative Swiss package.

Very high-end Swiss watch brand Vacheron Constantin once in a while makes extremely expensive one-of-a-kind pieces for their most important customers. The Vacheron Constantin Vladimir is just such a timepiece and is explored here.

In support of the world-wide Volvo Ocean Race, Swiss watch brand IWC has produced a special version of its conservative though sporty Portuguese Yacht Club Chronograph watch in titanium with a carbon fiber dial.

Exclusive independent Japanese watch makers are very rare. One just brand is the eponymously named Hajime Asaoka, and his Tourbillon watch is explored here.

The Icon XL watch from newer Swiss watch brand John Isaac Geneve is tested and reviewed here.

A little open-work in a watch dial always helps. Using an in-house made movement, these new Heart Beat Manufacture Dual Time Automatic watches from Frederique Constant are useful travel watches with a neat avant garde classical look.

You can listen to the Hourtime Podcast for our take on these watches and more.

Click to view slideshow.


60beat iPad Gaming Accessory Could Be The iOS Missing Link

Posted: 01 Jan 2012 09:43 AM PST

It appears the iPad gamepad of our dreams has finally arrived. The 60beat is a full-sized gamepad designed for iOS devices and it connects to iPads and iPhones via the headphone jack. While there aren’t many games that support the technology (yet), the concept is fairly simple. The controller works by sending signals through the devices’ microphone jack.

Works with all 60beat GamePad compatible games
Package includes : GamePad and Audio Splitter
4 foot cable from GamePad to headphone jack
Color is white with black joysticks and buttons
Made from hard resin plastic

Because it is portable it won’t bog down your baggage like the iCade accessory and it should be trivial for games makers to add support in future titles. $50 is a little pricey, but it might mean the difference between fun and failure when it comes to run and jump classics like Mega Man on the iPad.

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