How Technology Is Helping Modern Language Revitalization Efforts, Part 2 TREY SADDLER 1/12/15 In the previous article, we discussed companies and organizations that have worked with tribes to develop language-learning materials. These efforts should be commended, but it can be difficult for smaller tribes to gain the support necessary to create polished language learning products. In this article, we will talk about some of the websites already available for preservationists and students to utilize in order to learn and maintain their native languages.
RELATED: How Technology Is Helping Modern Language Revitalization Efforts
Freelang.net
Freelang.net is a free online dictionary updated by volunteers similar to the likes of Wikipedia. A quick glance of the languages offered on their website shows there are already dictionaries created for Blackfoot, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Gwich’in, Mohawk, Mohegan, Ojibwe, and Tanacross. Anyone can create a dictionary using this website, and they can be accessed online or through a program for the Windows operating system. There are tools in place to address dialect differences, and some of the dictionaries are fairly comprehensive as they are compiled from a variety of resources.
Cree Online Dictionary
The Cree Online Dictionary is one of the best examples of a dictionary for a specific language. The interface is clean and easy to use, and there is an app available for mobile devices. Like Freelang.net, this dictionary pulls from a few different printed dictionaries and also includes syllabic translations for most words. Collaborations like this give hope for the preservation of Native American languages, and hopefully we will see more efforts like this in the future.
Forvo.com
This website allows any user to upload words and spoken translations for them. Unfortunately, this resource has not been used extensively by tribes and only a handful of audio clips exist for Aleut, Cherokee, Cree, Creek, Inuktitut, Inupiaq, Micmac, Mohawk, Navajo, Ojibwe, Shoshoni, and Tlingit. One of the beautiful things about it is that independent websites like the Cree Online Dictionary can integrate with them and incorporate audio clips provided by users with their own translations, creating a truly valuable resource for language students. Hopefully mentioning this site will help to bring attention to this free resource, and motivate more users to provide spoken translations to be used by all.
Online Radio Stations/Podcasts
For those who are not familiar with them, podcasts are short audio recordings ranging from a few minutes to a couple of hours discussing a specific topic. They are especially useful for language learning, and can be specific lessons on vocabulary and grammar or conversations between native speakers on various topics. Many podcasts are free, like the Lac du Flambeau Language Podcast mentioned in part 1. Podcasts are easy to create and share through multiple services like iTunes and PodOmatic. The beauty of podcasts is they can be consumed while working or traveling, providing listeners with a mobile immersion and learning experience tailored to their needs.
Online radio stations can be found for some native languages, usually mirroring the content found on the public local radio stations that they are derived from. MBC Radio based out of Saskatchewan broadcasts their Achimowin Cree program from 1 to 3 p.m. CST on weekdays, and users can listen to the station via their website. The same is true of NCI FM, based out of Manitoba, which broadcasts “Voices of the North” from 7 to 8 p.m. CST with DJ Lorraine George, a fluent Cree speaker. While some native language stations can only be found locally, many stations are realizing the importance of offering their content to a broader audience and mirror their content online.
Anki
While not specifically a language learning website or program, Anki is the most powerful flash card program available and it deserves a special mention. Extremely powerful but somewhat complex to learn, this program should be at the forefront of any language learner’s arsenal. Many tutorials and guides exist explaining how to use this program and the book Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner is one of the best books to accompany this software. Anki is available for Windows, OSX, Linux, Android, iOS, and as a website when using a public device. The software is free except for the iOS version, and flashcards can be synced between all of these devices at no cost.
Many websites and programs are available that can be utilized for learning Native American languages. Most of the resources are free, and the ones that are paid are usually worth the money. Crowd-sourced websites like Forvo and Freelang offer communities a way to document and preserve their languages, while flash card programs like Anki and language-specific apps mentioned in the previous article offer students a way to expose themselves to the language on a daily basis. In the final article we will discuss some of the more social avenues for learning and practicing these languages, along with additional resources students can use to acquire their target language.
Trey Saddler is an enrolled member of the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Montana. He is currently attending Salish Kootenai College in Montana and is expected to finish his Bachelor of Science in Life Science with a focus in Environmental Health in June. He is an EPA Greater Research Opportunities (GRO) Fellow, and has interned with the EPA, NIEHS, and at the SKC Environmental Chemistry Laboratory. He studies Native American languages in his free time.
In a recent Science of the Total Environment study, researchers in the United Kingdom examine available studies for significant correlations between declining cognitive function in childhood and adult life and air pollution parameters. The study findings provide evidence of the inextricable interweaving of networks linking human environmental and individual health to productivity and socioeconomic background.
Air pollution, directly and indirectly, harms health due to climate change, higher temperatures favoring the emergence of new diseases, and spreading existing disease vectors beyond their accustomed habitats. Air pollution is also a threat to the feasibility and sustainability of healthcare systems as they exist today.
Particulate matter, ozone, and nitrogen oxides (NOx) are some of the most prevalent air pollutants, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and European Environmental Agency (EEA).
Cognition refers to mental processes involved in learning and using knowledge or information. This includes acquiring, processing, transforming, and storing such data with timely retrieval. Good cognitive skills are key to maintaining good physical and mental health, achieving academic success, rising in society, and earning more.
Air pollutants may not reach the brain directly but produce inflammation and oxidative stress that have neurological effects. Inflammation may be neuronal or systemic and may also involve dysregulated immunity that can lead to neuronal degeneration.
About the study
Earlier research has shown a link between cognition at the population level and the degree of air pollution and cumulative exposure. The current review supports these previous findings while also focusing on cognition as experienced by the people at large rather than in terms of specific clinical diagnoses such as autism or dementia.
The researchers included 86 studies in their qualitative analysis, with 14 in the meta-analysis. Except for Africa, all other continents were included.
Most studies in the meta-analysis explored air quality at home or school, thus measuring potential exposure to air pollution in the form of particulate matter less than or equal to 2.5 micrometers in size (PM2.5). For children and adolescents, the risk of exposure-linked general cognitive deterioration was not supported by research; however, the strength of the evidence is too weak to make a definitive conclusion.
In other words, the studies came to varying conclusions, might have tested different sets of cognitive skills, and, as a result, may have used too different methods to be clustered together in a single meta-analysis. Standardized cognitive tests might help avoid such deficits in future studies.
What did the study show?
Some studies indicated lower intelligence in children between the ages of eight and 11 exposed to higher levels of black carbon (BC) but not coarse PM, PM of 10 micrometers or less (PM10), or ozone in younger children up to eight years of age. In addition, several studies showed a decline in executive function, especially working memory and attention span.
PM2.5, PM10, and NOx exposure were linked to poor executive function in several studies that did not depend on a single cohort, unlike the above.
Available research does not support an association between memory and learning or between reaction time and the speed at which a child processes data or exposure to various air pollutants like NOx, PM2.5, and ultrafine particles (UFP).
With young adults, few studies have explored cognitive outcomes with exposure to air pollution.
In those above the age of 40, some associations with general cognitive decline and PM2.5 or NOx exposure were identified. In addition, PM2.5 exposure was also associated with reduced verbal fluency and executive function.
Previous meta-analyses showed significant adverse effects were due to increasing exposure to air pollution in low-exposure areas but not high-exposure areas. This could be due to the overall high level of exposure-related harmful effects in high-exposure areas; therefore, the range of exposures used in these areas might fail to detect the change in harm level.
Prior studies that covered long periods showed significant negative associations between cognition and exposure levels. However, cognition studies were of relatively good quality only in older adults.
Most studies focused on children or older adults above 40 who are considered at higher risk due to rapid changes in their cognitive processes. Intelligence and reasoning skills were not well studied; however, verbal fluency in older adults showed a reduced association with an increase in PM2.5.
Despite the limited number of studies on young adults, this group appears to be more affected by exposure to air pollution than children or older adults. Further research is thus essential in this group, as the brain rapidly develops up to the age of 25 years and continues after that at a slower pace until the end of life.
The extant studies also did not account for the confounding effects of noise pollution, which is often co-existent with air pollution. Moreover, the effects of exposure to air pollution at one period of life may be heavily influenced by previous exposure and its developmental impact.
Cognitive effects due to such exposures may vary depending on the developmental phase and period of life. At present, cumulative slow mechanisms such as attrition of neurons by slow injury or chronic inflammation affecting the whole body may be implicated. However, more acute effects have been shown to possibly affect the brain.
Immediate and acute exposure, therefore, could disrupt contemporaneous cognitive processes and have a lasting cognitive impact through disruption to longitudinal cognitive processes.”
Such differences in the latent period before injury become apparent following an acute injury or with different pollutants. This phenomenon was evident in one study where short-term effects on general cognitive function were more significantly associated with PM2.5 than with NOx. However, the converse effects were seen with long-term consequences for these two pollutant types.
Notably, the high variation in significance and direction of associations could be due to the combination of effects from performing different tasks. With the single task of verbal fluency, where the same task was applied across various studies, heterogeneity of the effect on meta-analysis was low.
Task similarity alone does not explain heterogeneous effects since heterogeneity was low for the meta-analysis of executive function using different tasks but high for other single-task meta-analyses. Instead, exposure levels, latency period, and bias could play a role.
Nevertheless, most associations did find support in the outcomes reached by the meta-analysis, thus indicating an association between air pollution and some cognitive processes.
Future directions
This review identified much evidence that was supportive of associations between environmental air pollution and cognition in humans, but not for all pollutants and all cognitive outcomes.”
However, the evidence could not be classified with a high degree of certainty.
The researchers also make several recommendations. First, using standardized tools in global research would improve the meta-analysis by ensuring better comparability.
Secondly, much more research must be conducted to examine how air pollution affects cognition during the vulnerable periods of adolescence and young adulthood when the brain undergoes dramatic changes. Such analysis should also be extended to cover a broader spectrum of cognitive functions.
Similarly, a range of air pollutants, especially those which often occur together or affect the response to another, should be studied. Unfortunately, the current study only assessed a select list of pollutants.
The importance of adjusting for pre-existing risk factors such as birth difficulties, other forms of pollution, and risk of injury during childhood is also highlighted. These need further exploration to better understand their relationships and modifying effects on the results of pollution exposures.
Mechanistic studies are also indicated to strengthen the potential causality of an association.
Journal reference:
Thompson, R., Smith, R. B., Karim, Y. B., et al. (2022). Air pollution and human cognition: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Science of the Total Environment. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.160234.
Dr. Liji Thomas is an OB-GYN, who graduated from the Government Medical College, University of Calicut, Kerala, in 2001. Liji practiced as a full-time consultant in obstetrics/gynecology in a private hospital for a few years following her graduation. She has counseled hundreds of patients facing issues from pregnancy-related problems and infertility, and has been in charge of over 2,000 deliveries, striving always to achieve a normal delivery rather than operative.
"In a recent Science of the Total Environment study, researchers in the United Kingdom examine available studies for significant correlations between declining cognitive function in childhood and adult life and air pollution parameters. The study findings provide evidence of the inextricable interweaving of networks linking human environmental and individual health to productivity and socioeconomic background..."
Soft-spoken education revolutionary Sal Khan has a few ideas for how to radically overhaul higher education. First, create a universal degree that's comparable to a Stanford degree, and second, tra...
"This book is a collection of the full country reports and working papers created by the COER members from the countries that were included in the study within of the research project EduArc on distributed learning infrastructures for OER and digital learning content in higher education ..."
"This book is a collection of the full country reports and working papers created by the COER members from the countries that were included in the study within of the research project EduArc on distributed learning infrastructures for OER and digital learning content in higher education ..."
Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student, or self-learner.
They can improve precision in surgery making it less invasive and speeding recovery; and in palliative care monitor vital signs and improve quality of life. The challenge now is to win over the patients
Driverless cars? Google has already wheeled one out. Robo-cops? Prototypes are on the scene. Love-bots? One in six people say they would have sex with an android. But how many people would want to go under the knife of a robo-surgeon?
It might seem like a solution dreamed up by Aldous Huxley, but it’s already a reality. Since 2000, more than two million operations worldwide have been performed by about 3,000 da Vinci surgical robots. While each one fills a decent-sized room, their “hands” are super-small, high-precision instruments. Now researchers are racing to develop the next generation of surgical robots to help to seek and destroy cancers, set bones or even just a hold a camera during an operation.
It might conjure up an image of Star Wars’ C-3PO in scrubs, but many of these medical machines are actually closer to the robots used to build your car. “It’s not that the robots do any of the surgery themselves,” says Tony Belpaeme, professor of cognitive systems and robotics at Plymouth University. “They are instruments for the surgeons to use for keyhole surgery, as they offer greater precision than handheld tools, particularly in hard-to-access parts of the body such as close to the spinal cord, and recovery is then so much faster because the operation is so precise.”
Not that a lack of automation is anything to be sniffy about; these machines still use powerful computers to carry out difficult jobs. Their lack of automation is down to the technological challenges of giving a robot the skill and judgment of a surgeon, as well as the lurking fear of legal action and even just the desirable reassurance of having an expert on hand for those awful “what-ifs”.
Where the researchers are taking their cue from the seriously sexy technology of driverless cars is, for example, in the development of domestic robots for palliative care, be it helping you make a cup of tea or alerting the doctor if you skip your medication. “I don’t see any application for artificial intelligence during surgery at the moment,” says Belpaeme. “For a computer to do something intelligent, it has to be able to see what’s happening. Now that’s OK in a structured environment, but the operating theatre is just a mess to a computer and it will be very hard for it to make sensible decisions. However, I do see a role in the future for more autonomous robots giving surgeons a helping hand as an assistant during operation.”
Initially, the vision behind the da Vinci robot was that a surgeon in London could operate in safety on a sick child in Liberia or a wounded soldier in Afghanistan, but financial, technological and communication worries have, for the present, put paid to such dreams. Now the promise of medical robotics lies in facilitating operations that are quicker and more accurate, meaning shorter hospital stays, greater patient turnover, lower chances of patients catching hospital superbugs and an overall saving of money. Robots in the home offer further support, keeping patients eating, moving and medicating.
For surgeons, who are often backing the development of these robots, the benefits of a machine like the da Vinci system are manifold. “The natural instinct of a surgeon is to be hands on the patients, so sitting at a console staring at a screen controlling a robot does take some getting used to,” says Pardeep Kumar, consultant urological surgeon at the Royal Marsden, London, who regularly operates using the da Vinci robot. “But it is such an immersive experience that I’ve been able to carry out more operations, more quickly and successfully than I could have dreamed of. I just bumped into one of my patients being discharged three to four days after an operation using the robot, instead of the three to four weeks it would have taken in the past.”
But it isn’t just about high precision. “The physical demands of surgery aren’t talked about much,” says Kumar. “As a surgeon I have vowed to keep going until I am in my mid to late fifties, but the strain on the neck, shoulders and back make it difficult to keep going for much longer than that. However, operating sitting down using a robot means I could keep going for longer than I had thought.”
It isn’t just keyhole surgery that can benefit from cutting-edge tech. Sanja Dogramadzi, a reader in robotics in the department of engineering design and mathematics at the University of the West of England, is a pioneers of medical robotic technology for the operating theatre. In collaboration with Professor Roger Atkins, an orthopaedic surgeon at University Hospitals Bristol, she designed what is believed to be the first robot-assisted system to tackle the problem of complex joint fractures. For her, the attraction of medical robotics is about solving complex problems that can change lives: “Medical robotics has lots of potential to transform the quality of life of every single one of us. If you can put bones back together, then people can walk again. What’s more important than that?” For Dogramadzi, the main technological challenge is achieving accuracy while avoiding what some see as the cumbersome form of systems like the da Vinci. “We are building a modular system that consists of a number of small interlinked robots. And while each component can be accurate down to less than a millimetre or degree, the problem is, how accurate is the whole system when it is working together?”
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However, she too believes it could be a while before autonomous systems are admitted to theatre. “Hardware would, for example, need positional sensors and safety stops to prevent accidents,” Dogramadzi says. “The software would have to be able to work on many different levels at the same time – what the scalpel was doing, what was going on with the auxiliary staff in the operating theatre – then bring it all together to make a decision. This is a big challenge. By keeping the surgeon in the operating theatre it makes our research easier, cheaper and quicker.”
But if physically constructing medical robots is difficult, the real sticking ground is the quagmire of ethics. “Who is responsible if something goes wrong? It is not always going to be one organisation. It’s going to be complicated,” says Dogramadzi.
Yet while scalpel-wielding robots might alarm patients, there is evidence that, for some procedures at least, they may be cautiously welcomed. “The initial pilot study in 2013 into patients’ perceptions of using robots in foot fracture surgery was generally positive,” Dogramadzi says. But, as she points out, surgeons were clearly in the picture. “I doubt that the response would have been so positive if the robot was fully autonomous.”
These are issues of huge import, yet to those at the bench it makes progress frustratingly slow. “Obviously you should not be able to go and do whatever you want,” Dogramadzi says, “but there are so many obstacles in the way of actually doing a project like this.”
One that has risen to the fore in the wake of the NSA revelations is that of privacy and security. Indeed, while home-help robots, such as Mobiserv, have a beguilingly innocent face, the data they hold could make them prime targets for hackers. Autonomous surgeons, robotic pills and contraceptive chips take concerns to a whole new level.
And well they might. This year a security audit published by Essentia Health, which runs about 100 hospitals, doctor’s surgeries and pharmacies in Minnesota and neighbouring states, helped to reveal to the public how badly protected much of our current healthcare technology is. Critical equipment, such as pumps that distribute antibiotics around the body and defibrillators, were, according to the report, vulnerable to hackingwith one of the issues being the poor use of passwords and rare employment of data encryption. It was even possible to change medical records or reboot machines or reboot machines. The firewalls of surgical robots in particular were easy to take down.
Despite such concerns, Dogramadzi, believes there will be a rise in robotics in many areas of medicine. “I am working now with a radiographer to see how we can use novel robotic technology to help position people during radiography,” she says. But it seems that even if questions of security and privacy can be ironed out, some procedures that will always be tackled the analogue way: “Culturally we still like to have a human there to look after you if something goes wrong, like in childbirth. We could go in that direction – but probably shouldn’t.”
Say hello to your life saver
It may seem hard to imagine that this robot, with its ridiculous balloon-shaped head and a tablet computer strapped to the front, might possibly mean the difference between life and death.
Yet if you were elderly and unwell, or recovering from a serious operation, it just might. The robot is designed to work with you to share certain information – such as your heart rate, eating habits and even whether you have taken your medication – with your family, doctor and other carers. It can summon help if it notes unusual behaviour. And in extreme situations – say if you had a heart attack or stroke – it is planned that future models could even take control of the situation.
As part of their research for the European FP7 programme, researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory were, according to project leader Dr Praminda Caleb-Solly, “exploring embodiments” – an important part of how to make the domestic care robot’s interface more friendly for older adults who might not feel comfortable with technology.
“Mobiserv” was a European research project on smart technology that ran from 2009 to 2013. The aim was to develop robots, smart clothing, activity recognition systems and even smart medicine bottles to assist older people to maintain active, independent lives.
“What we found is that people want to be able to customise and personalise the robot by such means as changing the way it speaks, for instance giving it a cheeky character, making it hum while working and even giving it a smell,” says Caleb-Solly. But she says the negative portrayal of robots in popular culture is a problem –people may simply be alarmed by robo-helpers. “For example if you suddenly found the robot by the side of your bed in the night because you’d had a heart attack, demonstrating some degree of intelligence and taking control when you are not able to.” With more field-testing Caleb-Solly and her team hope to fine tune the robot to optimise their usefulness around the house in a range of situations.
The steadiest hand in the theatre
It is said that a hi-fi system is only as good as its speakers. Similarly for keyhole surgery, according to Jeremy Russell, CEO of OR Productivity which includes FreeHand 2010: “An operating theatre is only as good as the person who holds the camera for the surgeon.” The FreeHand system replaces what can be a wobbly picture with a rock-steady image controlled by a camera on a scope held in the iron grip of a robotic arm. It has been estimated this robot can help to speed up operations by 10% by improving the quality of the image a surgeon sees on their monitor. The FreeHand works by giving the surgeon direct control over where the camera goes via a hands-free controller on a headband. The direction of the camera is controlled by a movement of the head, the three-speed unit is started and stopped by touching a foot pedal, and a tap on the table enables the zoom.
Master stroke: a needle that can travel through the brain
According to Robert J Webster III, director of the Medical and Electromedical Design Lab at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, the vision that unites the innovations coming out of his laboratory is simple: “To help doctors heal people more effectively by engineering better tools for them to use in doing so.” It is not surprising that Webster was attracted to solving the problem of blood clots in the brain - his father had one, though he was lucky and survived. Forty per cent of the people who develop one will go on to die from it. Webster’s team came up with a miniature robot made of a series of curved flexible tubes which allow it to navigate through delicate brain matter along a route mapped out by a doctor from a brain scan.
The doctor determines how much material is to be removed and the robot’s computer-controlled needle tip does the rest. Studies have suggested that it should be able to remove up to 92% of the clot. For Webster, integrating the robot with medical imaging equipment was the greatest challenge. He says it could take between four and 10 years before we see the robot used in hospitals, depending on how quickly the technology is transferred to a commercial partner. Webster has moved on to other projects, including robots that use arms inspired by octopus tentacles and elephant trunks, enabling them to pick up and manipulate small objects more effectively.
Exoskeleton gives stroke patients a hand
It might be chalky white and fairly bulky, but could transform someone’s life after a stroke has left them with no feeling in an arm or unable to grip things tightly. That is at least the hope of Dr Thomas Burton, who designed the exoskeleton during his PhD at the Bristol robotics laboratory and built it using 3D-printing technology. This makes it easier to manufacture made-to-measure exoskeletons, which have the added advantage of enabling the mechanical joints to align with each person’s natural hand joints to improve what’s called biocompatibility. The exoskeleton is controlled by a computer which receives messages from sensors when the person tries to manipulate or grasp an object – picking up a cup of tea, for example – then activates motors to create a natural grasping motion, including an opposable thumb.
The aim is to give patients extra confidence to perform even basic tasks at home, as well as improving muscle tone. Now that the technology has been shown to make a real difference, the race is on to make it sleeker and suitable for anyone who needs support in everyday life.
The heavily-armed surgeon designed for the front line
With its four arms hanging over the patient, the da Vinci Surgical System looks more like a machine out of Alien than something that belongs in an operating theatre. Yet as of the end of June Intuitive Surgical had installed 3,102 da Vinci Surgical Systems in hospitals worldwide, and more than two million surgical procedures had been performed since the system’s approval by the US Food And Drug Administration in 2000.
According to Catherine Mohr, vice-president for medical research at Intuitive, the robot was “the brainchild of Darpa [Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency], who wanted a robot to work on soldiers injured in battle but didn’t want a surgeon exposed to the frontline”.
With this dream on hold, the focus has shifted to minimally invasive surgery for operations on patients with, for example, heart, urinary or prostate problems. This requires rearranging the conventional operating theatre to accommodate the console at which the surgeon sits to control the robot, as well as the cart with its four arms. “A surgeon with a handheld tool can be accurate to 100 micrometres, or one tenth of a millimetre,” says Mohr. “But using da Vinci even someone untrained can be accurate to 50 micrometres.” Although the da Vinci robot has been subject to a number of lawsuits, Mohr argues that surgery is never without risk and that Intuitive Surgical was found not liable the one time a case went to trial.
In the future, the da Vinci System could help the surgeon make better decisions, for example with “surgery by numbers” – where the monitor highlights target areas then helps guide the surgeon to the exact spot. But it’s unlikely to go the whole hog and end up driverless.
“I would never say never about AI,” says Mohr, “but to be able to deal with the demands of an operating theatre the AI would have to learn like us, and we are simply not there yet.”
Puzzling out bone fractures
Dr Sanja Dogramadzi loves a puzzle and Professor Roger Atkins, an orthopaedic surgeon at University Hospitals Bristol, gave her a difficult one to solve – the solution to which they will soon be testing on human cadavers.
According to Dogramadzi, on a daily basis surgeons face the “difficult problem of having to solve the three-dimensional challenge of putting very small pieces of broken bones back together with two-dimensional images on their monitors: get it wrong and someone may never walk again”.
First she saw it as a mathematical puzzle, then had a revelation about how her robots could come to the rescue: “All we needed to do was put robots there, then we could sort out the fracture accurately, without the need for a major incision.” The solution was two imaging systems allowing the robots to grasp pieces of bone and put them back together in the right combination. One of the imaging systems is a standard CT scan on a computer, while the other is an external positioning system much like the Kinect motion-sensing input device used on Xbox gaming computers.
This tells the surgeon where the robots and their tools are in real time. For Dogramadzi it came down to “a systems integration problem of making the hardware and software work together and achieve a degree of accuracy that is better than the surgeon – or at least the same as a surgeon”. Some very small movements can even be completed by the robots independently.
With this technique, Dogramadzi believes that she and Atkins have developed a unique way to repair fractures in an operating theatre, using minimally invasive robot surgery. She believes that the technology could help repair a wider range of fractures and even have non-medical uses, such as helping archaeologists to put broken vases back together.
Radio-controlled contraceptive
In the future women will no longer have to worry about taking the pill if MIT spin-out MicroCHIPs has its way. It is developing a competitively priced radio-controlled microchip-based implant, the size of a postage stamp, that will deliver a daily dose of contraception for up to 16 years.
The chip is implanted under the skin in a simple outpatient procedure using local anaesthesia, and can be stopped remotely if the needs of the patient change without having to go into a clinic or hospital.
Each day a small electrical charge melts an ultra-thin seal of platinum and titanium around a pinhead-sized reservoir of a hormonal contraceptive releasing a carefully controlled dose into the body.
The next challenge is to make sure the implant cannot be hacked, activated or deactivated without the woman’s knowledge. One way of doing this is to make it only possible to communicate with the implant at skin level and by making sure that all communication to and from the implant is encrypted.
MicroCHIPS has also developed a sensor to go with the chip which can adapt the dosage to the needs of the user on a day-by-day basis
While research on the implant began in the 1990s, it has really gathered pace in the last few years with backing from Bill Gates, and a simple version of the implant has been successfully tested in Denmark.
MicroCHIPS will be submitting a more advanced implant for pre-clinical testing in the US next year – and the device could possibly go on sale by 2018.
Live-stream from smart pill
The small intestine is approximately 6.25m long and about 20mm in diameter and is incredibly hard for medicine to reach. However, researchers at Imperial College, London, think they have found the answer by developing a robotic pill which will do precisely this.
The pill itself is 11mm in diameter and 30mm long, and crammed inside is a camera that can rotate through 360 degrees, a repositionable syringe with the capacity for approximately 1ml of drugs, and a retractable anchor which holds the pill in place.
Like similar robot pills that are mostly used for diagnosis, after it has been swallowed the robot pill relies on the contraction and relaxation of the muscles known as peristalsis to move through the intestines.
The intention is that video will be live-streamed from the camera on the pill so that, unlike most other camera pills, which are a bit hit-and-miss, when the operator sees that they have reached the target area, he or she can operate the anchor to hold the pill in place.
“At the moment commercial camera pills are passive, but with this robotic pill you will be able to target specific regions of the small intestine,” says Stephen Woods, PhD student and head of design at surgical instrumentation manufacturers Duckworth & Kent.
However, there are “significant challenges” to miniaturise the new technology, Woods says, and inevitably these have caused delays although they are now mainly overcome.
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
Today's web users go beyond traditional search engines to search. Learn about the platforms that should be on every search marketer’s radar.
Dan Toplitt on October 4, 2022 at 6:00 am | Reading time: 22 minutes
Imagine you’re on vacation, it’s approaching noon and you’re starting to feel hungry. You’re eager to enjoy the best local cuisine your destination has to offer. So you go to Google Maps and search for “best lunch restaurant near me”, a topic that’s more than doubled in search volume on Google in the last three years alone.
Over 80% of searches worldwide occur on Google based on the latest search engine market share data. You might think that you’ve just completed the most common search journey to lunch.
However, nearly 40% of U.S. searchers between the ages of 18 and 24 go to TikTok or Instagram when looking for a place for lunch, according to Google’s own internal research.
In other words, if a restaurant in the area wants to attract this audience, their marketing strategy needs to extend beyond Google to include these platforms.
Now imagine if you were crunched for time and had decided you’d rather order lunch in your room than go out to eat.
If you’re vacationing in San Jose, consumers in your area are statistically more likely to find lunch on DoorDash, whereas New York consumers are more likely to order through Uber Eats.
Ultimately, these scenarios illustrate that when building a search marketing strategy, marketers need to consider the context behind a search, such as:
Demographics and psychographics of searchers.
Their location when conducting a search.
The goal of their search journey.
We need to erode the distinctions we have historically made between traditional search marketing domains (e.g., Google and Microsoft Bing) and the broader ecosystem of digital platforms.
Search is one of the most common human behaviors in the digital space. It’s no surprise that Google is the most-visited website across the globe and all the top 10 most-visited websites worldwide feature a search experience that is core to the user experience.
Search is also one of the most valuable user behaviors for marketers because it is an expression of users’ needs and intent. Search data is not only a key input into content and advertising strategies, but also it provides valuable insight into the mindset of high-value audiences (HVAs).
As a result of technological innovation and shifts in user behavior, modern search marketing strategies must now consider a significantly broader set of platforms than ever before to effectively understand and market to target audiences and capture true search demand.
The following are just a few examples of the variable nature of users’ search engine consideration sets, and the platforms that should be on every search marketer’s radar.
Traditional search engines
Perhaps apart from Wikipedia loyalists, traditional search engines remain the dominant destination for users seeking information online.
Google announced a new technology in 2021 called Multitask Unified Model, or MUM, which aims to more efficiently answer complex queries that may previously have required multiple searches. MUM is multimodal, which means it understands information across text and images, and in the future, can expand to video and audio.
This ability to index multiple content formats and provide dynamic, relevant search results pages is why traditional search engines will continue to be a catch-all destination for searchers.
Google, Bing, and Yahoo make up 95% of the worldwide desktop market share of search engines. Despite that global dominance, it’s important for search marketers to also consider other traditional search engines.
For example, the following search engines attract the largest share of searches within their primary region:
Each of these engines requires a customized SEO strategy and paid advertising can be bought through the engines directly.
There are also more recent entries into the landscape globally that are worth monitoring, including:
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo launched their search engine in 2008, which aims to protect users’ privacy by not tracking their search history. DuckDuckGo has been steadily growing in use since its launch and now processes 3 billion searches per month. It had a 0.6% search engine market share worldwide and 2.52% search engine market share in the U.S. as of August 2021.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t require a custom SEO strategy, though you can set yourself up for success by following best practices for Bing SEO and claiming your local listings on Apple Maps, if applicable, based on the sources from which DuckDuckGo compiles its organic results. Paid search ads can be bought via Microsoft Advertising’s partner network.
Ecosia
Ecosia launched in 2009 and like DuckDuckGo, it promotes privacy as an alternative to more mainstream search engines. Ecosia’s privacy features include:
Anonymizing all search data within one week.
Not selling data to advertisers.
Avoiding the use of third-party trackers.
And more.
Its main differentiator, however, is its climate-conscious mission. Ecosia uses its profits from advertising to fund climate action and has already planted more than 150 million trees around the world.
Organic and paid results are sourced from Microsoft Bing, so Bing SEO best practices and a Microsoft Advertising account are the primary tools required to target Ecosia searchers.
Brave Search
Brave Search, another “no-tracking” search engine, exited its beta phase in June 2022, a year to the day after launching. It surpassed 2.5 billion queries in its beta phase and is projecting queries to double over the next year.
Unlike DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, Brave Search has its own ranking algorithm that serves results from its own web index.
Searchers can personalize their organic results using the newly released Goggles beta feature and engage in conversations related to their queries across forums such as Reddit and StackExchange through the Discussions search engine results page (SERP) feature.
In the future, Brave Search will feature ads that are part of the Brave Rewards program, which allows users to earn a portion of the revenue Brave earns from advertising. In the meantime, searchers can subscribe to Brave Search Premium for $3/month to enjoy an ad-free search experience.
Yep
Yep is a search engine currently in beta being built by the SEO tool company Ahrefs, which announced an initial $60 million investment in June 2022. It is committed to user privacy in a similar manner to many of the other search engines that are positioning themselves as alternatives to Google and Bing.
What makes it stand out, though, is its proposed revenue-sharing model. Yep plans to share 90% of its advertising revenue with content publishers. It does not yet serve ads in its current beta state, so no distributions have been made to date. Yep has its own web crawling technology, index, and ranking algorithm.
That said, it’s too early in its development to warrant separate consideration in website optimization strategies unless a publisher wants to promote the use of Yep to its users as a means to earn potential revenue from the revenue-sharing model when it launches its advertising solution.
You
You opened in public beta in November 2021 and announced a $20 million funding round at that time led by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. It has since closed an additional $25 million round of funding in July 2022 to develop “premium features” and expand on its unique apps feature.
You offers users a customizable search engine experience by supplementing web results from its own ranking algorithm with custom apps that appear in the SERP.
Apps range in functionality from providing results sourced from a specific website (e.g., Wikipedia) to its YouCode app, which allows users to generate code based on a search query. You touts its privacy features as a key selling point for users and does not currently serve ads.
Richard Socher, co-founder of You and former chief scientist at Salesforce, claims that You has a rapidly growing user base in the hundreds of thousands. He also reported that 50% of users continue to use You after setting it as their default search engine.
It’s likely still too early for You-focused optimization efforts to yield any meaningful results, but its expanding library of apps is worth monitoring, especially for publishers who may want to partner with You to launch a custom app.
Apple
Finally, while Apple has yet to formally launch their own search engine, there have been multiple rumors over the past few years that they are planning to develop a Google Search competitor. Among Siri, Spotlight, Camera, Shazam, and more, Apple already has a variety of search entry points seamlessly integrated into its operating system.
Google is currently the default search engine powering the web results on Apple devices and will pay Apple an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion in 2022 for that privilege. The agreement between Apple and Google requires that the former won’t compete against the latter in the internet search business, so Apple would be violating its agreement with Google if it were developing its own search engine.
Despite that considerable barrier, Apple will continue to be a massive presence on the fringe of the traditional search engine conversation positioned to capture a meaningful share of searches were they ever to launch their own.
Sensory search engines
Sensory search refers to the growing trend of using senses beyond typed keyword inputs to conduct searches.
Voice search and visual search are the two most common forms of sensory search today. The leading platforms in sensory search vary based on the sense being activated by the searcher.
Visual search
The human brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. Compare that to the measly 36 words per minute the average mobile phone user can type into a search bar and it stands to reason that 62% of Gen Z and Millennial consumers want visual search capabilities, more than any other new technology.
Google, Bing, Amazon, and Pinterest are currently among the leading visual search engines. Google Lens usage has tripled in the last year with Lens now being used nearly 8 billion times per month.
As augmented reality and computer vision technologies advance, the lines between searching and browsing will blur. For example, Google Lens’ “scene exploration” capability will allow users to search multiple objects captured within a wider scene in real time.
“Imagine you’re trying to pick out the perfect candy bar for your friend who’s a bit of a chocolate connoisseur. You know they love dark chocolate but dislike nuts, and you want to get them something of quality. With scene exploration, you’ll be able to scan the entire shelf with your phone’s camera and see helpful insights overlaid in front of you.”
Expect these examples to become commonplace as technology improves since a 2019 study by the Intent Lab found that visual information is preferred over text by a majority of respondents across all categories except for electronics, household goods, and wine and spirits.
The average English speaker talks at a rate of more than 100 words per minute. While speaking a search query isn’t as efficient as snapping a photo, it’s still more efficient than typing.
Google processes hundreds of millions of voice search queries per day. Voice search adoption is most prevalent among new internet users. In India, nearly 30% of all Hindi search queries are spoken.
Google, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa are the most prominent voice search engines, often referred to as digital assistants.
One of the more unique nuances of voice search is the diversity of devices used to conduct voice searches. While phones and smart speakers are the most obvious voice search devices, in-car voice assistants are the second-most used surface for voice assistant technology in the U.S.
This device distribution expectedly presents a challenge when optimizing content for voice search, but the best practices are actually quite straightforward:
Analyze user search behavior.
Create content that directly answers user queries.
Ensure technical code and visual elements such as images are properly optimized for devices with no visual output.
Some businesses will find more industry-specific opportunities, as well. For example:
The optimization and syndication of location data across digital platforms for brick-and-mortar businesses can attract in-car voice searchers to a nearby store.
Paid media and the optimization of product detail pages on Amazon.com can drive purchases among Amazon Echo searchers.
Audio search
There’s a lot of overlap behind how the technology of voice search and audio search works.
The engine:
Is activated through some user action (e.g., say “Alexa” to an Echo, click the microphone icon in the Google search bar, etc.).
Listens for the audio input.
Then returns a result based on machine learning to match queries to results.
Voice search is the most notable form of an audio search, but there are some audio search engines that don’t feature voice search capabilities.
One such engine is Shazam, the music recognition app purchased by Apple for about $400 million in 2018. Launched in the U.K. 20 years ago as a text message service, Shazam surpassed 70 billion song recognitions in August 2022 and boasts 225 million global monthly users.
Many of the commercial use cases for the app are focused on the music industry, such as the recently launched concert discovery feature.
Additionally, Shazam launched a feature in 2011 that allowed users to capture audio from TV programs and ads and receive related marketing messages and special offers.
This technology and the rise of sonic branding in marketing through sonic logos, “earcons”, and other forms of branded audio content provide creative opportunities for advertisers to connect with audio searchers.
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Activating the senses in the search journey isn’t limited to inputs. Searches for multimedia content (e.g., images, videos, audio, etc.) are a major driver of behavior across digital platforms.
The platforms on which multimedia content seekers search differ by the content format sought. The paths users take to ultimately consume multimedia content are even more varied.
In the U.S., viewers spend an average of 31 minutes per day watching videos on YouTube. Content creators who upload videos to YouTube can apply YouTube SEO best practices to enhance discovery across YouTube and Google Search and can promote their videos on YouTube through paid advertising.
Vimeo is another major video search engine with usage that pales in comparison to YouTube but still is the 589th most visited website worldwide. It rolled out a series of optimizations to its platform in May 2022 aimed at improving the visibility of Vimeo creators’ videos within Google’s organic search results.
The Vimeo team also highlighted some video SEO best practices for its creator community to implement in its announcement about the platform’s SEO updates. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo does not have advertising and instead positions its core offering as a streaming video on demand (SVOD) service.
Search plays a big role in the streaming video space and is a core platform function across Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, and many of the other major providers. There are even streaming video search engines that search across platforms and can personalize results based on a searcher’s active subscriptions.
JustWatch and Reelgood are two engines in that category. While search discovery and advertising opportunities across these streaming search engines are limited in relevance if you’re not a content producer yourself, there is value in the search data available for analysis from these engines to keep a pulse on pop culture and inform potential content partnerships or ad targeting across streaming platforms.
Audio content
Digital audio content commands a massive share of attention with U.S. adults spending an average of one hour and forty minutes per day consuming this medium.
Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Deezer are just a handful of the many mainstream audio streaming services with extensive libraries of music and podcasts.
Soundcloud and Bandcamp are among others that skew toward more niche and indie artists.
Audible and Audiobooks.com are purveyors of audiobooks and other spoken word content.
Search is a core function of all these platforms. The search for audio, however, isn’t limited to digital audio streaming services.
If you conduct a search in Google for "taco bell commercial song" (97k searches in the last 12 months) or "applebees commercial song" (79k searches in the last 12 months), you might end up on YouTube or iSpot.tv.
If you think this type of search is an anomaly, consider that "att lily" has been searched 2.4 million times in the last 12 months.
This behavior extends to all forms of media. For example, if you can’t open Shazam quickly enough to record the ballad playing in the 13th episode in the 4th season of Roswell, New Mexico (*spoiler alert*) during the montage of Michael and Alex getting married, a quick Google search may direct you to Tunefind, where the community has confirmed that song is "I’ll Be" by Edwin McCain.
Most advertisers produce at least some content that includes audio, and many drive brand awareness through the promotion of that content supported by massive budgets.
To maximize the return on that investment and ensure that content is discoverable, it’s imperative that all content is:
Hosted publicly (on a brand website, YouTube, or other platforms).
Properly marked up to include key details that someone previously exposed to the content may search.
Social media
Commanding one hour and fifteen minutes per day among U.S. adults, social media competes for attention by building immersive sensory experiences.
Scrolling is probably the action most associated with social, but search plays a significant role across platforms, as well.
Search is so central to the Pinterest experience that the company rolled out Pinterest Trends in 2019, which features topics with high search volume over a rolling 7-day lookback period. Pinterest search data drives the company’s trend prediction engine Pinterest Predicts, which boasted an impressive 80% success rate in its predictions from 2021 coming true.
Search volume data across social platforms is much harder to come by than other engines that share absolute volume or trending estimates. Even outdated data, however, indicates the immense scale of social media search activity. For example:
Not all these searches have meaningful commercial intent nor do social platforms typically offer advertisers the ability to target on-platform search queries.
For organic discovery, hashtags can improve relevance for target search queries and the content of the posts themselves should incorporate keywords relevant to their target audience.
Social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have shared more information in recent years about their personalized search ranking algorithms. Interest in TikTok SEO has grown significantly, with more than 84 million views of videos on TikTok with the #tiktokseo hashtag as of early September.
As evidenced by Gen Z’s search journey for lunch in the U.S., many searches conducted across social media have inherently local intent.
It’s no surprise that many social platforms have responded to this intent by incorporating more local features into their search and discovery experiences.
Snap and Instagram feature maps with details about nearby businesses overlayed.
Facebook hosts a robust network of location pages.
Twitter recently launched a Location Spotlight tool that allows brick-and-mortar businesses to post details about their location on their Twitter profile.
As social platforms expand these local features, they will continue to compete for local search market share held by traditional maps apps (like Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps) and local directories (such as Yelp and TripAdvisor).
Advertising opportunities supplement an organic social strategy and local listings management in driving discovery across these platforms, preferably leveraging a technology provider to syndicate consistent updates across publishers.
Online shopping and ecommerce search engines
BloomReach made waves in the search industry in 2016 when they released the results of a study they commissioned that found 55% of U.S. shoppers start their product search journey on Amazon. Since then, a multitude of surveys has reinforced that Amazon is the top destination for product searchers.
Trailing behind Amazon as the go-to product search engine are:
Traditional search engines (e.g., Google, Bing).
Other retailer search engines (e.g., Walmart, Target, etc.).
More recently, online shoppers have reported starting their product searches on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.
This emerging trend skews toward a younger audience with 18% of U.S. online shoppers between the ages of 18 and 24 years old reporting that they typically start their product search journey on TikTok, third behind Amazon and Google.
Content optimizations informed by shopper search behavior and syndicated across retail partner websites will help brands gain organic visibility across the digital shelf.
Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect are the two largest retail media ad networks by spend, but an increasing number of retailers are entering the retail media landscape with their own offerings.
Kroger Precision Marketing powered by 84.51°.
Sam’s Club’s Membership Access Platform.
The CVS Media Exchange.
Target’s Roundel.
Instacart Ads.
eBay Ads.
Best Buy Ads.
Wayfair Media Solutions.
Macy’s Media Network
And the list keeps expanding. Advertising partners such as Criteo and PromoteIQ enable advertisers to efficiently target searches across a broad network of retailer sites.
Specialized search engines
As illustrated in the scenario at the outset, the search for lunch occurs on a wide array of engines beyond Google and Microsoft Bing. Many other verticals follow this same pattern.
Travel
OTAs (e.g., Expedia, Booking.com, Kayak) act as one-stop shops for travel search needs.
Disruptors like Airbnb and VRBO compete with accommodation network websites (e.g., Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt) for searchers looking to book stays.
Real Estate
Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and Redfin are among the leading search engines for buying and selling homes.
Apartments.com, HotPads, and regional engine StreetEasy in New York attract apartment hunters.
Recipes
Allrecipes, Taste of Home, and Epicurious are prominent engines in this space, though traditional search engines and social media platforms capture a high volume of recipe search demand as well.
Automotive
Cars.com, Autotrader, CarMax, Edmunds, and Carvana are just a few of the major players in this competitive search space.
Finance
Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, and brokerage firm websites facilitate traditional investment searches. Nerd Wallet, BankRate, and Credit.com power credit card searches.
CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, and exchange websites (e.g., Coinbase, Crypto.com, Binance) cater to cryptocurrency searchers.
Health
WebMD, MayoClinic, and Healthline are among the reputable sites with search experiences built to surface important health information
Freelance talent
Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.com help businesses of all sizes source freelance talent, while helping freelancers search for work
Contractors
Angi (formerly Angie’s List), HomeAdvisor, and TaskRabbit are among the major search engines in this vertical
Jobs
Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Google are a few of the top search engines for job seekers
Note: This list could go on and on as there are specialized search engines in virtually every vertical.
What this list and the preceding examples ultimately illustrate is that search is fragmented now to the point where the line has blurred between search platforms and digital platforms with search as a key function.
As the quality of site search solutions available to website owners continues to improve, this line will only get blurrier.
Maximizing the value of search
So, what’s a marketer to do? How do companies maximize the value of their search programs in the context of their broader communications strategy?
The following guidelines provide a framework that reflects the role search should play in the comms planning process:
Analysis of search behavior across relevant search engines contributes to the development of high-value audiences (HVAs).
Understanding the digital platforms most frequently used by each HVA is key to mapping their respective search journeys across platforms.
An assessment of the key digital platforms will qualify the importance of search as both a driver to and function within each platform, and lead to a search strategy that will incorporate some permutation of the following tactics:
Optimizations that can be made to an on- and/or off-platform owned experience to drive organic search discovery within the platform.
Advertising that can be purchased to target users’ on-platform search queries.
Advertising and/or experiences – both paid and earned – targeting off-platform searches that attract users to the platform.
Analysis of platform search data to generate insights that deliver a better understanding of target audiences and inform other strategic initiatives.
Search strategists should be included throughout the entire comms planning process to ensure that marketers are present during all stages of users’ increasingly fragmented search journeys.
Interested in learning more? Well, there are search engines for that. Which ones will you use?
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
"Today's web users go beyond traditional search engines to search. Learn about the platforms that should be on every search marketer’s radar.
[...]
Maximizing the value of search
So, what’s a marketer to do? How do companies maximize the value of their search programs in the context of their broader communications strategy?
The following guidelines provide a framework that reflects the role search should play in the comms planning process:
Analysis of search behavior across relevant search engines contributes to the development of high-value audiences (HVAs).
Understanding the digital platforms most frequently used by each HVA is key to mapping their respective search journeys across platforms.
An assessment of the key digital platforms will qualify the importance of search as both a driver to and function within each platform, and lead to a search strategy that will incorporate some permutation of the following tactics:
Optimizations that can be made to an on- and/or off-platform owned experience to drive organic search discovery within the platform.
Advertising that can be purchased to target users’ on-platform search queries.
Advertising and/or experiences – both paid and earned – targeting off-platform searches that attract users to the platform.
Analysis of platform search data to generate insights that deliver a better understanding of target audiences and inform other strategic initiatives.
Search strategists should be included throughout the entire comms planning process to ensure that marketers are present during all stages of users’ increasingly fragmented search journeys.
Interested in learning more? Well, there are search engines for that. Which ones will you use?"
Advancements in technology have changed the way consumers manage their own healthcare and interact with medical providers. A recent survey from Morning Consult found that 34% of U.S. adults currently track or manage their health using a mobile app. Specialized care delivery facilities are on the rise, and new tech trends are making healthcare more personalized than ever. In addition, telehealth technology allows patients to access health services, such as virtual appointments, from the comfort of their homes.
Two medical scientists use a double-headed microscope to conduct research.
Healthcare professionals must adopt these trends and technologies — such as outpatient care centers, precision medicine, predictive analytics, and real-time data visualization — to provide optimal care for patients.
Trends for the Future of Healthcare Technology
Providing a stellar patient experience is top priority in the healthcare industry, and many providers are shifting their focus from volume- to value-based care. Instead of following a traditional fee-for-service model, value-based care rewards providers by determining the cost of the service as it relates to the quality of care, patient outcomes, and other factors. Forbes predicts that up to 15% of global healthcare spending will be on value-based care by the end of 2019. As technology improves, allowing medical professionals to better track quality of care, bundle packages, and transition to Electronic Health Records (EHRs), value-based care will become a more viable option. This is great news for patients, as the quality of their individual experience takes center stage. The next generation of healthcare administrators will help leverage technologies that will allow their facilities to adapt to this new approach. Completing a program such as an online bachelor’s degree in general studies with a concentration in healthcare can prepare professionals to become leaders in implementing value-based care strategies.
The future of healthcare services will ask professionals to integrate traditional skills in care, communication, and leadership with new skills in technology and analytics. These new skills will work in tandem with the adoption of the following trends and advancements:
Specialized Outpatient Care Centers To improve the patient experience, healthcare providers are offering more timely and specialized treatment. Outpatient surgeries, or same-day surgeries, are typically less complex, and they include cataract removals and colonoscopies. Instead of the traditional hospital setting, these procedures are now offered at ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs).
ASCs and other specialized outpatient care centers help reduce overall medical costs by moving specialized services to locations with that sole focus. This frees up space and staff at larger medical institutions, while also providing more focused care for the patient at the ASC. The quality of care is also improved, as specialists are able to work in an environment focused around their area of expertise. ASCs also require reporting and quality measures almost double those of outpatient surgeries in similar hospital settings. Healthcare professionals must educate consumers on the benefits of these specialized facilities through the use of quality data that compares ASCs and hospitals for outpatient care. Health educators play an important role in helping raise awareness about ASCs to the public and can help navigate patients to an ASC environment as appropriate.
Precision Medicine for Personalized Healthcare In contrast to a one-size-fits-all approach, precision medicine takes into account an individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle to identify personalized disease treatments and prevention strategies. Best known for its uses in oncology, such as tracking the genetic profile of patient’s tumor cells to identify the most effective forms of treatments, precision medicine is also impacting pharmaceutical research and healthcare technology.
With more than 6,000 known genetic diseases, healthcare organizations need the right technology to manage patient data and apply insights to patient care. According to a study by Scipher Medicine, 65% of patients prescribed the top five selling drugs in the world did not respond to treatment. However, precision medicine offers an opportunity to more accurately predict if a patient will respond to a particular drug therapy, helping to lower healthcare costs associated with wasted prescriptions and ineffective patient treatment, as well as to prevent unnecessary side effects and drug interactions. Precision medicine is also expanding to the realm of preventive healthcare, allowing patients to make lifestyle choices to stay healthy and track their physical well-being. As the future of healthcare technology gains a more patient-centered focus, healthcare professionals will utilize existing technologies like wearables to collect consumer health data and analyze it in a way that patients can understand and leverage with ease.
Predictive Analytics for Population Health Management Many facets of the healthcare industry are relying on data more each year. The information gathered allows healthcare providers to leverage analytics to improve the health of the population and identify at-risk individuals through population health management (PHM).
PHM is the aggregation of patient data across multiple sources, including payers, hospitals, primary care providers, specialists, pharmacies, and more. The analysis of this data to create a single patient record helps healthcare providers to improve both clinical and financial outcomes. Forbes predicts that 50% of all healthcare companies will have dedicated resources to access, share, and analyze real-world data to use across their organizations by the end of 2019.
Healthcare administrative professionals and data scientists receive this data in real-time and use the insights gained from its analysis to identify and address gaps in patient care within the population. They can use this information to develop care management programs that optimize outcome and cost savings. The future of healthcare services requires intelligent application of PHM programs by healthcare administrators, who can create and implement policies, plan and oversee budgets, and ensure compliance with procedures and regulations. Real-time Data Visualization The use of big data in the medical field is not a new phenomenon, and the future of healthcare includes advances in predictive analytics to increase response efficiency, provide real-time reporting, and identify at-risk populations. Predictive analytics is on track to be a more than $9 billion industry by 2020. It works by using historical information and transactional data to predict health-related occurrences, such as how the weather might affect patients with respiratory ailments.
As healthcare organizations move toward sharing more data with each other, the collection and creation of larger datasets will increase accuracy and allow organizations to spot trends. For example, a network of hospitals that shares data can better predict when flu season will hit and how severe the strain will be.
Healthcare administrators must keep up with ever-evolving technologies to prepare organizations to move toward real-time data visualization to meet patient demands. Administrators must collaborate with doctors, technicians, medical centers, IT teams, and government bodies to facilitate the implementation of advanced technologies. Telehealth Advancements in the future of healthcare will also have an impact on the treatment of a variety of medical needs. Telehealth — the ability to engage in healthcare quickly and seamlessly through technology like smartphones, laptops, and streaming services — marks a significant shift in the modern world of healthcare. Accessibility is improved, as those who do not live near a medical facility can leverage telehealth to connect with their healthcare professional more regularly. Additionally, those who require treatment for certain disorders, such as a communication disorder or a mental health disorder, can engage in treatment from the comfort of their home, via video chat.
The application of telehealth to communication disorders is still relatively new, but degree programs in communication sciences and disorders are preparing aspiring speech language pathologists and other professionals for the intermingling of traditional methods of care and telehealth.
Improving Patient Experience Patient wellness is the heart of healthcare. As technologies advance and the prevalence of data grows, healthcare professionals use insights from the latest trends to help improve the quality of patient care. A career in the healthcare industry can be rewarding, as medical professionals play a hand in improving population health, as well as helping to lower healthcare costs. Explore the Future of Healthcare Services If you’re interested in pursuing a rewarding, fast-paced career in the healthcare industry, explore Maryville University’s online healthcare degrees. Each of Maryville’s online healthcare degree programs can prepare you for success in the role you’re most passionate about. Maryville offers both bachelor’s and master’s programs that you can complete online, so you can prepare to step up and fill vital roles in the healthcare field.
Dr. Russ Conrath's insight:
Advancements in technology have changed the way consumers manage their own healthcare and interact with medical providers.
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
Here are some of the top healthcare technologies of 2016 and beyond…The Star Trek Style Tricorder
To start off, Yes I am a Star Trek Nerd, loved almost every series, specially TNG (The Next Generation) and no not because I shave my head like Patrick Stewart.
Star Trek: The Next Generation Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Star Trek has always inspired millions of people, including myself to reach beyond what we thought was possible and achieve the impossible. And futuristic medical devices are no different.
Qualcomm has a contest, called XPrize, that was just extended till 2017 for 7 final teams developing the almighty Tricorder featured in the picture below from the popular Star Trek series. The winner receives $10 million to bring the device to reality.
In the fictional Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a multifunction hand-held device used for sensor scanning, data analysis and recording data.
Three primary variants of the tricorder appear in Star Trek, issued by the fictional organization Starfleet. The standard tricorder is a general-purpose device used primarily to scout unfamiliar areas, make detailed examination of living things, and record and review technical data. The medical tricorder is used by doctors to help diagnose diseases and collect bodily information about a patient.
2. Interoperability between Health Systems
Interoperability solutions for exchanging patient information across care settings is one particular technological development that will shape the future of healthcare organizations.
Value-based care and health information exchanges are an increasingly important part of the overall healthcare landscape, and the ability for all providers – from general practitioners and specialists to post-acute care organizations, etc. – will only grow as a critical component of care delivery in the future.
These types of solutions have only started being developed in the past few years by companies such as referralMD, that are changing how healthcare companies communicate by including post-acute care providers in critical interoperability workflows, as these providers are expected to be a big part of health care cost containment.
By including post-acute care in interoperability strategies, healthcare organizations can ensure that critical patient information across all care settings will be connected, providing a more detailed patient picture for more specific treatment plans and improved patient care.
The statistics are damning, hospitals lose $75+ million per year per 100 affiliated physicians due to referral leakage, a burden that can be reduced by proper referral network management that companies such as referralMD can help monitor. Hospitals are just starting to get make changes in their budgets to include programs that can truly help patients receive better care, and save their staff’s time in the process.
Not only are hospitals affected but so are small-to-mid sized practices, with many having to juggle 100’s of specialty offices with different workflow requirements, without an electronic way to exchange information, the process breaks down, information is not accurate, and time is wasted.
3. Robotic Nurse Assistant
I have many of friends that are nurses that are injured every year from having to move or lift patients in bed or after an emergency from a fall. The problem is very common and many of times there is not someone around that is strong enough to lift a patient immediately after one of these occurrences.
There are many variations from a full robot such as RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) developed by RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries and assisted hardware such as HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) robot suits delivered by Cyberdyne.
RIBA is the first robot that can lift up or set down a real human from or to a bed or wheelchair. RIBA does this using its very strong human-like arms and by novel tactile guidance methods using high-accuracy tactile sensors. RIBA was developed by integrating RIKEN’s control, sensor, and information processing and TRI’s material and structural design technologies.
A company by the name of HAL is a robotics device that allows a care worker to life a patient with more stability and strength and helps prevent injuries to our nurses.
4. Artificial Retinas
The United States typically defines someone as legally blind when the person’s central vision has degraded to 20/200, or the person has lost peripheral vision so that he sees less than 20 degrees outside of central vision. Normal vision is 20/20, and people can usually see up to 90 degrees with their peripheral vision. An estimated 1.1 million people in the United States are considered legally blind.
This has led to companies like Nano-Retina to develop a sophisticated and elegant solution intended to restore the sight of people who lost their vision due to retinal degenerative diseases. The miniature Nano Retina device, the NR600 Implant, replaces the functionality of the damaged photoreceptor cells and creates the electrical stimulation required to activate the remaining healthy retinal cells. NR600 consists of two components; a miniature implantable chip and a set of eyeglasses worn by the patient.
Very interesting technology for those that are always sitting in front of the computer like myself, hopefully it will not be needed by me, but it’s great that companies are advancing for those that suffer this debilitating illness.
5. Advances in Prosthetics
War is in our DNA, and with conflict, there is injuries to our Military including loss of limbs and traumatic brain injury. DARPA is looking to change that by enabling wounded service members with amputations to neurally control state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs. The goal is to assist them in returning to active duty and to improve their quality of life. Program developments may impact the broad community of patients with medical amputations, spinal cord injuries and neurological diseases.
The challenges lie with creating an interface that is directly compatible with our own nervous system and making the connection fast enough to interpret our movement intent without latency.
I have been following Les’s story (an amputee) for a while and featured it in last years 2015 version of this article, see video below and wanted to showcase it again as organizations such as Johns Hopkins are making great strides in the movement to help the world live an easier life.
5. Remote Patient Monitoring
Monitoring programs can collect a wide range of health data from the point of care, such as vital signs, weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and electrocardiograms.
This data is then transmitted to health professionals in facilities such as monitoring centers in primary care settings, hospitals and intensive care units, skilled nursing facilities, and centralized off-site case management programs. Health professionals monitor these patients remotely and act on the information received as part of the treatment plan.
Monitoring programs are tools to help achieve the “triple aim” of health care, by improving patient outcomes and access to care, and to make health care systems more cost effective.
For example:
In this 2014 study, a six-month feasibility study was conducted on eight patients with a history of Acute Exacerbation of CODP (AECOPD). Each patient was given a mobile phone to record major symptoms, such as dyspnoea, sputum color and sputum volume; minor symptoms such as cough and wheezing; and vital signs. During the trial, the rate of hospital admissions were significantly lower and there were fewer ED presentations and GP visits compared to a six-month matched period in the preceding year. Such results showed “the potential of home monitoring for [analyzing] respiratory symptoms for early intervention AECOPD.”
Similar to our previous Star Trek device, a company in Israel, Tyto Care, has developed a portal device that helps monitor all sorts of health parameters to let doctors diagnose patients remotely. Allowing your doctor to perform their job with accurate metrics about you or your child’s illness without having to resort to a in person visit. The Tyto device is currently going through the FDA clearance process, hopefully one day offering people the option of staying at home rather than visiting the clinic in most simple health situation.
“We are coming together at a pivotal time in the mobile healthcare industry. As health reform demands more focus on delivering quality outcomes and reducing costs, providers are turning to technology like remote monitoring to diagnose and treat more patients in ways that use time, money and human resources efficiently and effectively. Our shared vision is to become a worldwide leading remote monitoring company,” said Jon Otterstatter, President and Chief Global Strategy Officer of Preventice Inc.
6. Anti-Aging Drugs
The dream, or the nightmare, depending on how you take it, is living forever, or at least in the foreseeable future to 120+ years old. 2016 will be the year of a new anti-aging drug test that will enter trials which could see diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consigned to distant memory.
Scientists now believe that it is possible to actually stop people growing old as quickly and help them live in good health well into their 110s and 120s.
Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.
“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing”
Dr Jay Olshansky, University of Illinois Chicago
If successful it will mean that a person in their 70s would be as biologically healthy as a 50-year-old. It could usher in a new era of ‘geroscience’ where doctors would no longer fight individual conditions like cancer, diabetes and dementia, but instead treat the underlying mechanism – ageing.
The new clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME, is scheduled to begin in the US next winter. Scientists from a range of institutions are currently raising funds and recruiting 3,000 70 to 80 year olds who have, or are risk of, cancer, heart disease and dementia. They are hoping to show that drug slows the ageing process and stops disease.
Outlining the new study on the National Geographic documentary Breakthrough: The Age of Ageing, Dr Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois Chicago, said: “If we can slow ageing in humans, even by just a little bit it would be monumental. People could be older, and feel young.
“Enough advancements in ageing science have been made to lead us to believe it’s plausible, it’s possible, it’s been done for other species and there is every reason to believe it could be done in us.
“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing.”
7. Tooth Regeneration
Hey Kids, here is some candy! All kidding aside, this could be an amazing advancement if the technology holds true in the coming years.
Colorful fish found in Africa may hold the secret to growing lost teeth. In a collaborative study between the Georgia Institute of Technology and King’s College London, researchers looked at the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi in Africa, who lose teeth just to have a new one slide into place. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identifies the genes responsible for growing new teeth and may lead to the secret to “tooth regeneration” in humans.
“The exciting aspect of this research for understanding human tooth development and regeneration is being able to identify genes and genetic pathways that naturally direct continuous tooth and taste bud development in fish, and study these in mammals,” said the study’s co-author Paul Sharpe, a research professor from King’s College, in a press release. “The more we understand the basic biology of natural processes, the more we can utilize this for developing the next generation of clinical therapeutics: in this case how to generate biological replacement teeth.”
Another study from a Harvard team successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. The results were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Stem cells are no ordinary cells. They have the extraordinary ability to multiply and transform into many different types of cells in the body. They repair tissues by dividing continually either as a new stem cell or as a cell with a more specialized job, such as a red blood cell, a skin cell, or a muscle cell.
Dentures and dental implants may soon become a thing of the past. Stem cell research is making it possible to regrow your missing teeth! This is a much-needed medical advancement, especially considering that by age 74—26% of adults have lost all of their permanent teeth.
8. Lightbulbs that Disinfect and Kill Bacteria
Hospitals are known to be potentially dangerous place with lot’s of people with different elements and diseases. One company, Indigo-Clean has developed a technology using visible light that continuously disinfect the environment and bolsters your current infection prevention efforts.
How it works
The 405nm emitted from Indigo-Clean reflects off of walls and surfaces, penetrating harmful micro-organisms
The light targets naturally occurring molecules called porphyrins that exist inside bacteria. The light is absorbed and the excited molecules produce Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) inside the cell
405nm creates a chemical reaction inside the cell, similar to the effects of bleach
The Reactive Oxygen Species inactivates the bacteria, preventing it from re-populating the space
9. Electronic Underwear Preventing Bed Sores
Having elderly grandparents that have died from complications due to bedsores is extremely unfortunate, as much of these issues could be prevented. When patients stay motionless for days, weeks, or months they develop painful open wounds due to lack of circulation and compressed skin.
And believe it or not, bedsores can be deadly. Roughly 60,000 people die from bed sores and resulting infections every year, draining $12 billion from the U.S. medical industry.
Developed by Canadian researcher Sean Dukelow of Project SMART, the electric underpants—deliver a small electrical charge every ten minutes. The effect is the same as if the patient was moving on their own—it activates muscles and increases circulation in that area, and effectively eliminates bed sores, thereby saving lives.
10. Long Lasting Batteries for Medical Devices and Wearables
The need for power is evident in today’s world, for our houses, cars, and medical devices such as pacemaker batteries that typically need to be replaced with an expensive surgery. With the need for power-hungry devices comes innovation in the form of new technologies that will help provide the world with longer lasting, faster charging batteries.
Aluminum-Ion Batteries: Chemistry Professor Hongjie Dai from Stanford University and his team say their aluminum-ion battery prototype can fully charge a phone in one minute and maintain its strength through thousands of recharge cycles — over seven times as many cycles as current phone batteries. But fast charging times aren’t the only advantage this new prototype has over the standard lithium-ion battery found in most of our devices. Perhaps the battery’s most impressive quality is its flexibility, meaning it could work with any future devices that are curved or use bendable screens.
Micro Supercapacitors: Rice University researchers who pioneered the development of laser-induced graphene have configured their discovery into flexible, solid-state micro super capacitors that rival the best available for energy storage and delivery. Rice’s micro super capacitors charge 50 times faster than batteries, discharge more slowly than traditional capacitors and match commercial super capacitors for both the amount of energy stored and power delivered.
Foam Batteries: The future of batteries is 3D. Prieto is the first company to crack this with its battery that uses a copper foam substrate. This means these batteries will not only be safer, thanks to no flammable electrolyte, but they will also offer longer life, faster charging, five times higher density, be cheaper to make and be smaller than current offerings.
Skin Power: Researches from the National University of Singapore have created a replacement for batteries all together would be an electrode used to harvest the current caused by friction on the skin and clothes. The result is enough power, from a finger tap on skin, to power 12 LED bulbs. The future could mean there are no need for batteries in wearables or smart clothes. So how does it work? An electrode is used to harvest the current, so a 50nm-thick gold film is used. The gold film sits below a silicone rubber layer composed of thousands of tiny pillars that help create more surface area for skin contact, which creates more friction. Since the skin is a one of the triboelectric layers it means the device can be small. Scientists have already shown off a wearable powered by the device. Next gadgets to use it? Hopefully everything.
11. Health Informatics
More than half of US hospitals use some type of electronic records system, but only 6% meet all the federal mandates, according to a recent study out of the University of Michigan. According to researchers at the University of Chicago, 50% of health care dollars are wasted on inefficient record keeping processes. Electronic records have been shown to save large hospitals anywhere between $37 and $59 million. It streamlines the medical care process and lowers malpractice claims, and increases coordination between providers. Improvements still need to be made communicating patients between facilities as noted from referralMD, (Provider-to-provider communication software) where roughly 50% of all patients do not attend appointments, driving costs upwards, and lowering patient outcomes dramatically.
Practitioners and medical researchers can look forward to technologies that enable them to apply data analysis to develop new insights into finding cures for difficult diseases. Healthcare CIOs and other IT leaders can expect to be called upon to manage all the new data and devices that will be transforming healthcare as we know it.
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
Q: With the new 2016 CPT codes, I no longer see the 31620 Diagnostic Bronchoscopy code I used to use with EBUS (Endobronchial Ultrasound). How do I report a bronchoscopy with fine needle aspiration using EBUS now?
A: So, code CPT 31620 — the code that was used along with all diagnostic and therapeutic bronchoscopies when EBUS was performed — has been deleted. One of the three new codes added to the respiratory section, 31654 is the code that you will now use with other diagnostic and therapeutic bronchoscopies, if those codes are on this list (the list appears as a parenthetical note under code 316540): 31622, 31623, 31624, 31625, 31626, 31628, 31629, 31640, 31643, 31645 and 31646.The old combination 31620 and 31629 for Bronch with FNA and EBUS — is now 31629 and 31654.
MODIFIER 58 or MODIFIER 79
Q: A patient with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is taken to the operating room for creation of arteriovenous (AV) fistula (90-day global) in anticipation of dialysis. (As you are most likely aware, the fistula must mature for a period of time before it may be used).
Unexpectedly, the patient's renal status declined even further and the patient was not able to wait for the AV fistula to mature, so he was taken to surgery only a week later for a dialysis catheter placement.
We are struggling with modifier 58 vs. modifier 79. (I know, it's usually a question of modifier 58 vs. modifier 78) Some coders believe it should be modifier 58 because the reason for the surgery is the same: ESRD with need for dialysis. Some of our coders believe it should be modifier 79 because it is unrelated to the previous surgery, only related to the disease process and the second surgery was even a separate anatomical area.
A: Great question but you may be over-thinking this. You'll likely be asked to submit the documentation to the payer with either of these modifiers — so they will surely have an answer for you — you can count on that.
The purpose of both modifiers 58 and 79 is to underscore either the character of or the distinctness of the second procedure.
Modifier 58 gives three broad conditions that you may need to indicate: a) Staged (planned), b) more extensive, and c) therapy following a surgical procedure. Your scenario fits none of those.
Modifier 79 simply says "unrelated" to the original procedure. And "related" can mean a lot of things. The CCI edits do not link the codes to which you are referring — so there is no bundling. It is unlikely that these would hit an exclusion edit in payer software in the first place.
As to the reason for the surgery being the same — there is truth in that — but they are separate surgeries, unrelated to one another in a surgical sense. Given your scenario, I'd go with modifier 79.
FOURTH-YEAR RESIDENTS
Q: Can licensed fourth-year residents work in urgent care without supervision? Will CMS allow full payment for non-board-certified fourth-year residents for their patient care practice with no supervision? Is it a good or legal practice for an urgent care to hire solely fourth-year residents doing all the patient care?
A: We can't give legal advice. So you may need to share this question with others. From a coding and billing perspective there are some options here:
Residents are licensed medical professionals, MDs. There is a large body of regulatory guidance pertaining to supervision of residents in a teaching setting — very little outside the teaching setting. This is due principally to payments made to attending physicians and the need to make distinctions between which provider did what.
In your scenario, residents can apply for billing privileges and become credentialed to the extent possible with a given payer. There may be payer-specific limitations related to board certification but residents have been "moonlighting" since before there was a Medicare.
If a resident is not supervised by another credentialed physician, direct billing would be the only way to go to facilitate professional billing. If there were another credentialed physician onsite, CMS does allow one physician to bill incident-to another.
Dr. Russ Conrath's insight:
EBUS (Endobronchial Ultrasound). How do I report a bronchoscopy with fine needle aspiration using EBUS now?
For the first time gene therapy for cystic fibrosis has shown a significant benefit in lung function compared with placebo, in a phase 2 randomised trial published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal. The technique replaces the defective gene response for cystic fibrosis by using inhaled molecules of DNA to deliver a normal working copy of the gene to lung cells.
“Patients who received the gene therapy showed a significant, if modest, benefit in tests of lung function compared with the placebo group and there were no safety concerns,” said senior author Professor Eric Alton from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London. “Whilst the effect was inconsistent, with some patients responding better than others, the results are encouraging.” [1]
Cystic fibrosis is a rare inherited disease caused by mutations in a single gene called cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) and affects 1 in every 2500 newborns in the UK and over 90000 people worldwide. Scientists have discovered around 2000 CFTR mutations so far. These mutations make the lining of the lungs secrete unusually thick mucus. This leads to recurrent life-threatening lung infections, which result in lung damage that causes 90% of deaths in people with cystic fibrosis.
Since the discovery of the genetic basis for cystic fibrosis in 1989, scientists have developed a variety of viral and non-viral vector systems for delivering a corrected CFTR gene back into lung cells. Despite expectations of a rapid breakthrough, no cystic fibrosis gene therapy trial so far has been able to show long-term clinical improvement.
Coordinated by the UK Cystic Fibrosis Gene Therapy Consortium [2], the two-year study involved 136 CF patients aged 12 years or older from across the UK. Participants were randomly assigned to either 5ml of nebulised (inhaled) pGM169/GL67A (gene therapy) or saline (placebo) at monthly intervals over 1 year. Lung function was evaluated using a common clinical measure of the volume of air forcibly exhaled in one second (FEV1).
After a year of treatment, in the 62 patients who received the gene therapy, FEV1 was 3.7% greater compared to placebo [3]. This was a result of stabilisation of respiratory function rather than an improvement. However, the effects were inconsistent, with some patients responding better than others. In particular, in the half of patients with the worst lung function at the start of the study, there was a doubling of the treatment effect, with changes in FEV1 of 6.4%.
The concept of hyflex classes gained popularity as pandemic lockdowns started to ease. More people wanted to go out in public, while others felt it was too soon. Like many other organizations, schools had to figure out how to provide a balanced solution.
Though not created during the pandemic, many institutions adopted the hyflex model in the last couple of years. Now, the question is if this method will continue even if we put COVID-19 behind us.
With adequate professional development and support, many of the innovative strategies adopted as a result of the pandemic can continue onward, perhaps with some adjustments for the situation on the ground. What do you think?
61 million adults in the United States live with a disability. View an infographic snapshot of disability in the United States. Learn more facts about how disability impacts us all.
Dr. Russ Conrath's insight:
View an infographic snapshot of disability in the United States. Learn more facts about how disability impacts us all.
Philosopher & educational technologist; I try to find ways to bring together philosophical analysis, communications technology, and learning. Pipatio ergo sum! Robert is using Pinterest, an online pinboard to collect and share what inspires you.
Nicole Allen speaks about ways to incorporate open educational resources (OER) into higher education curriculum in order to reduce the financial burden place...
6 Writing and Editing Technological Tools for Students The possibility of overlooking the importance of writing great standard essays involves several processes. For one to write well, they must include research, excellent writing skills, and editorial skills. As a student, it is a must that you master the various skills regardless of the paper you are writing. Surprisingly, not so many students bother to either proofread or edit their essays before they submit.
While many students can deliver their essay papers on time, fewer of them are of high standards. It is caused by the lack of writing skills and coherently expresses the ideas. Mostly, you may find long and tedious sentences, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes. While some may be doing this unknowingly, a majority is caused by the lack of efficient ways of proofreading papers.
It is always important to pay attention to detail, even for smart students. Well, the existence of technological tools that enhance the editing and proofreading process makes work more comfortable. The following tools offer great assistance to students in making the editing of essays and other related works of writing easy.
Great Editorial and Proofreading Tools for College Students
Here are some of the most used tools by students in editing essay papers. Proofreading your work after writing prevents you from submitting a poor quality essay. Below is a review of each device you may use to deliver high-quality work effectively.
Bubbl.Us
Most students always experience some challenges coming up with ideas to write their essays. Well, bubbl.us may not be an editing or proofreading tool as such, but it is useful for idea development. Before you can start writing, you need ideas on what to write and how you will approach it. There are different ways of coming up with writing ideas:
You can use prompts Reading through related texts Eavesdropping on friends The app offers its services for free. You can use it to brainstorm on different ideas for any write-up. You may choose to arrange your ideas through the bubbl.us colors, format options, and different font sizes. You can also save your data if you register on their site.
Grammarly
There are a lot of mistakes that you may make during the writing of an essay. It is usually tiresome and time consuming to edit the paper in the old way. Reading through the paper numerous times to be sure that there are no errors left. Well, for a paper that is more than 20 pages long, it will take a bit of time to complete, except for an experienced essay writer.
However, with the use of a tool like Grammarly, editing becomes easier. The tool browses through an uploaded paper and identifies mistakes and grammatical errors. Also, it provides options as feedback to correct the errors. You can customize your corrections to fit the intended purposes.
One look Reverse Dictionary
In writing, we must use different words and collocations to provide a high-quality paper conveniently. This app helps you remember words that are right to apply in your essay.
One Look Reverse Dictionary makes you remember specific and right words applicable to the paper. Just type in the idea, and the right words will pop up for you.
Pro-Writing Aid
Sometimes we write essays, and then some errors affect its readability. To improve it, there are different tools such as the pro-writing Aid which can help you. Using such a tool, college students can help to get rid of the many errors that are common to rectify it.
Well, with unwanted repetition of specific words and use of passive voice sentences, your paper can be of poor quality — the features of this tool help in removing clichés, vague phrases, long sentences, and repetitiveness.
Clichés Finder
Most students use clichés in their writing, especially when under pressure to deliver. The cliché finder can assist you in removing any repetitions or cliché words. The tool is easy to use since you only need copy and then paste the writing in the toolbox and then click the “clichés finder” option. It is hard to avoid clichés. They make the text boring to read, and this is the tool to help you avoid such instances.
WriteCheck Plagiarism Checker
It is a huge mistake to write non-original content or copy from someone else. The tool has features that browse through both the text and the internet to check for originality. Once you have uploaded the text, you will download it. If there are any plagiarized texts, it highlights for you to rewrite it.
6 Writing and Editing Technological Tools for Students
The possibility of overlooking the importance of writing great standard essays involves several processes. For one to write well, they must include research, excellent writing skills, and editorial skills. As a student, it is a must that you master the various skills regardless of the paper you are writing. Surprisingly, not so many students bother to either proofread or edit their essays before they submit.
While many students can deliver their essay papers on time, fewer of them are of high standards. It is caused by the lack of writing skills and coherently expresses the ideas. Mostly, you may find long and tedious sentences, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes. While some may be doing this unknowingly, a majority is caused by the lack of efficient ways of proofreading papers.
It is always important to pay attention to detail, even for smart students. Well, the existence of technological tools that enhance the editing and proofreading process makes work more comfortable. The following tools offer great assistance to students in making the editing of essays and other related works of writing easy.
Great Editorial and Proofreading Tools for College Students
Here are some of the most used tools by students in editing essay papers. Proofreading your work after writing prevents you from submitting a poor quality essay. Below is a review of each device you may use to deliver high-quality work effectively.
Bubbl.Us
Most students always experience some challenges coming up with ideas to write their essays. Well, bubbl.us may not be an editing or proofreading tool as such, but it is useful for idea development. Before you can start writing, you need ideas on what to write and how you will approach it. There are different ways of coming up with writing ideas:
You can use prompts
Reading through related texts
Eavesdropping on friends
The app offers its services for free. You can use it to brainstorm on different ideas for any write-up. You may choose to arrange your ideas through the bubbl.us colors, format options, and different font sizes. You can also save your data if you register on their site.
Grammarly
There are a lot of mistakes that you may make during the writing of an essay. It is usually tiresome and time consuming to edit the paper in the old way. Reading through the paper numerous times to be sure that there are no errors left. Well, for a paper that is more than 20 pages long, it will take a bit of time to complete, except for an experienced essay writer.
However, with the use of a tool like Grammarly, editing becomes easier. The tool browses through an uploaded paper and identifies mistakes and grammatical errors. Also, it provides options as feedback to correct the errors. You can customize your corrections to fit the intended purposes.
One look Reverse Dictionary
In writing, we must use different words and collocations to provide a high-quality paper conveniently. This app helps you remember words that are right to apply in your essay.
One Look Reverse Dictionary makes you remember specific and right words applicable to the paper. Just type in the idea, and the right words will pop up for you.
Pro-Writing Aid
Sometimes we write essays, and then some errors affect its readability. To improve it, there are different tools such as the pro-writing Aid which can help you. Using such a tool, college students can help to get rid of the many errors that are common to rectify it.
Well, with unwanted repetition of specific words and use of passive voice sentences, your paper can be of poor quality — the features of this tool help in removing clichés, vague phrases, long sentences, and repetitiveness.
Clichés Finder
Most students use clichés in their writing, especially when under pressure to deliver. The cliché finder can assist you in removing any repetitions or cliché words. The tool is easy to use since you only need copy and then paste the writing in the toolbox and then click the “clichés finder” option. It is hard to avoid clichés. They make the text boring to read, and this is the tool to help you avoid such instances.
WriteCheck Plagiarism Checker
It is a huge mistake to write non-original content or copy from someone else. The tool has features that browse through both the text and the internet to check for originality. Once you have uploaded the text, you will download it. If there are any plagiarized texts, it highlights for you to rewrite it.
A college with a 4% graduation rate that saddles students with $25,000 in debt couldn't possibly be accredited, right? Wrong. That's a real college South University, in Savannah, Georgia that's...
Dr. Russ Conrath's insight:
4% graduation rate...Who's watching the watchdogs for higher education?
I’ve been looking at hospital supply chain automation and the IT surrounding it for a number of years now. Starting with Cardinal Health but then moving on to help a number of other vendors in the space, I’ve felt that there’s not been enough next-generation tech being applied to the low margin, high volume business of hospital supply management. Hospitals often spend tens of millions of dollars on EHRs and other IT systems that have little direct cost reduction capability but they ignore, often at their peril, supply management systems that can save immediate dollars. There seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Earlier this year I joined the board of Hybrent, led by founder and supply chain expert Harold Richards, because I instantly saw the value of what they were doing. While Hybrent is a startup funded by a couple of friends that I know have been successful in the past, I joined primarily because of Harold’s 21 years testing, applying, measuring and implementing supply chain strategies that have driven well over $50 million in costs out of the supply chain units where he’s served. While supply chain automation is often seen as an administrative activity, I’ve seen first hand that it’s actually directly tied to increase in patient & nursing satisfaction. I asked Harold to tell us a little about why supply chain automation is so important and here’s what he had to say:
Does Your Hospital Supply Chain Have Traits Of An Ant Farm?
You may have had an ant farm as a child and marveled at the cooperative efforts and precision of the ants as they went about their daily activities. Thanks to the panes of glass, you could see into the inner workings of the ant society at all levels and depths.
That same level of effort went into the anthill in the backyard – maybe even more due to the lack of protection. Yet it went unnoticed because it was underground. You only noticed problems when they affected ants that you could see at the top of the anthill.
So it is with the hospital supply chain, full of hard working individuals who run into daily challenges just as ants do. Both rely on excellent systems of communication to get things accomplished. However, ants do not have to deal with bureaucracy, integrating of mismatched systems, missing supplies and other time-wasting system failures (at least not as far as we can tell).
Front-line healthcare workers do spend precious time dealing with these problems, resulting in inefficiencies, higher costs, and potential poor patient outcomes. Spending 20% of your nurses’ time on supply scavenger hunts does not help anyone – certainly not the nurses.
Not only does this cause inefficient use of time, it causes inventory chaos – incorrect counts, hoarding supplies, missing orders and the like – that can snowball throughout your supply chain system. You have stressed and unhappy ants, so to speak.
These misfires cause turmoil within the ant farm and can lead to accidents like sentinel events. Looking at the bigger picture within healthcare, we are expected to do more with less. In my opinion this is a recipe for disaster.
Today, droves of patients are flocking to the ER’s like never before seeking treatment. As a result, emergency rooms all over the country are filled beyond capacity levels with less staff, more workload and higher expectations. According to USA TODAY, some hospitals are seeing 12% spikes. Purely from a metrics perspective this may not seem like much, but could result to patients dying while waiting for care.
With this increase in volume there now becomes a higher risk and demand for medical supplies & enhancement in supply chain efficiencies. The reality we live in is this; incorporating anything less than the traits of an ant farm will cause major mishaps in form of patients dying. It’s a sentinel event just waiting to happen.
Just imagine something as minor as clinical caregivers not having instant access to trauma, respiratory, and EMS supplies within a already busy emergency department while a patient is being triaged with chest pains. Quite a frightening forecast when you think about it. As they say, future behavior is predicated upon past behavior. The future outcomes of your patients weigh heavily on your actions.
As a hospital executive, your view may be that of the backyard anthill – you have surface information that gives you superficial knowledge, but without the overall view you need to fully anticipate or fix problems. Meanwhile, your care providers may be dealing with supply chain systems that hamper effective communication instead of enhancing it.
If you’re not doing these three things your patients are at risk and your hospital is losing millions of dollars in supply chain management:
You must setup a transparent assignable communication system for the front-line staff – A system allowing your “ants” to effectively communicate. With rules and filters that you define, user-friendly menus simplify the ordering process for your nurses and give real–time feedback that propagates through your system via real-time push-notifications and alerts. It’s imperative that everyone from nurses to supply chain personnel to trading partners works off the same set of information.
Compiles data, giving you and your staff immediate access to as much data as you need, based on your preferred settings. This gives you the “panes of glass,” if you will, to see into the complex workings of your system at any point in time. It’s equally important to have this data embedded within daily workflows to effectively make better business decisions.
Be accountable for setting up the rules and analytics that are important to your organization. Sense the need of urgency to prevent as well as fix problems. You can either process the output of the visibility system through a separate analytical engine to get the insight you need, or integrate the two along with any other useful support system.
The key is to get you the information and facts you need to make decisions when you need it, and not to overwhelm yourself with frivolous or useless information. If you can’t see the overall picture, and can’t interpret it, you can’t fix it. That is true at both the executive and care-provider level. Do you really know what’s going on in your “anthill” today?
Ants are models of efficiency, and with a proper Supply Chain Visibility System, your front-line care providers will be as well. They will be thrilled with the ability to streamline their time and prevent supply chain snafus. They will probably forgive you for any ant analogies you want to draw – although you’ll have to gauge that for yourself.
Dr. Russ Conrath's insight:
Patient satisfaction, hospital supply chain units need better IT and next generation technology.
Here are some of the top healthcare technologies of 2016 and beyond…The Star Trek Style Tricorder
To start off, Yes I am a Star Trek Nerd, loved almost every series, specially TNG (The Next Generation) and no not because I shave my head like Patrick Stewart.
Star Trek: The Next Generation Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard
Star Trek has always inspired millions of people, including myself to reach beyond what we thought was possible and achieve the impossible. And futuristic medical devices are no different.
Qualcomm has a contest, called XPrize, that was just extended till 2017 for 7 final teams developing the almighty Tricorder featured in the picture below from the popular Star Trek series. The winner receives $10 million to bring the device to reality.
In the fictional Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a multifunction hand-held device used for sensor scanning, data analysis and recording data.
Three primary variants of the tricorder appear in Star Trek, issued by the fictional organization Starfleet. The standard tricorder is a general-purpose device used primarily to scout unfamiliar areas, make detailed examination of living things, and record and review technical data. The medical tricorder is used by doctors to help diagnose diseases and collect bodily information about a patient.
2. Interoperability between Health Systems
Interoperability solutions for exchanging patient information across care settings is one particular technological development that will shape the future of healthcare organizations.
Value-based care and health information exchanges are an increasingly important part of the overall healthcare landscape, and the ability for all providers – from general practitioners and specialists to post-acute care organizations, etc. – will only grow as a critical component of care delivery in the future.
These types of solutions have only started being developed in the past few years by companies such as referralMD, that are changing how healthcare companies communicate by including post-acute care providers in critical interoperability workflows, as these providers are expected to be a big part of health care cost containment.
By including post-acute care in interoperability strategies, healthcare organizations can ensure that critical patient information across all care settings will be connected, providing a more detailed patient picture for more specific treatment plans and improved patient care.
The statistics are damning, hospitals lose $75+ million per year per 100 affiliated physicians due to referral leakage, a burden that can be reduced by proper referral network management that companies such as referralMD can help monitor. Hospitals are just starting to get make changes in their budgets to include programs that can truly help patients receive better care, and save their staff’s time in the process.
Not only are hospitals affected but so are small-to-mid sized practices, with many having to juggle 100’s of specialty offices with different workflow requirements, without an electronic way to exchange information, the process breaks down, information is not accurate, and time is wasted.
3. Robotic Nurse Assistant
I have many of friends that are nurses that are injured every year from having to move or lift patients in bed or after an emergency from a fall. The problem is very common and many of times there is not someone around that is strong enough to lift a patient immediately after one of these occurrences.
There are many variations from a full robot such as RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) developed by RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries and assisted hardware such as HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) robot suits delivered by Cyberdyne.
RIBA is the first robot that can lift up or set down a real human from or to a bed or wheelchair. RIBA does this using its very strong human-like arms and by novel tactile guidance methods using high-accuracy tactile sensors. RIBA was developed by integrating RIKEN’s control, sensor, and information processing and TRI’s material and structural design technologies.
A company by the name of HAL is a robotics device that allows a care worker to life a patient with more stability and strength and helps prevent injuries to our nurses.
4. Artificial Retinas
The United States typically defines someone as legally blind when the person’s central vision has degraded to 20/200, or the person has lost peripheral vision so that he sees less than 20 degrees outside of central vision. Normal vision is 20/20, and people can usually see up to 90 degrees with their peripheral vision. An estimated 1.1 million people in the United States are considered legally blind.
This has led to companies like Nano-Retina to develop a sophisticated and elegant solution intended to restore the sight of people who lost their vision due to retinal degenerative diseases. The miniature Nano Retina device, the NR600 Implant, replaces the functionality of the damaged photoreceptor cells and creates the electrical stimulation required to activate the remaining healthy retinal cells. NR600 consists of two components; a miniature implantable chip and a set of eyeglasses worn by the patient.
Very interesting technology for those that are always sitting in front of the computer like myself, hopefully it will not be needed by me, but it’s great that companies are advancing for those that suffer this debilitating illness.
5. Advances in Prosthetics
War is in our DNA, and with conflict, there is injuries to our Military including loss of limbs and traumatic brain injury. DARPA is looking to change that by enabling wounded service members with amputations to neurally control state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs. The goal is to assist them in returning to active duty and to improve their quality of life. Program developments may impact the broad community of patients with medical amputations, spinal cord injuries and neurological diseases.
The challenges lie with creating an interface that is directly compatible with our own nervous system and making the connection fast enough to interpret our movement intent without latency.
I have been following Les’s story (an amputee) for a while and featured it in last years 2015 version of this article, see video below and wanted to showcase it again as organizations such as Johns Hopkins are making great strides in the movement to help the world live an easier life.
5. Remote Patient Monitoring
Monitoring programs can collect a wide range of health data from the point of care, such as vital signs, weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and electrocardiograms.
This data is then transmitted to health professionals in facilities such as monitoring centers in primary care settings, hospitals and intensive care units, skilled nursing facilities, and centralized off-site case management programs. Health professionals monitor these patients remotely and act on the information received as part of the treatment plan.
Monitoring programs are tools to help achieve the “triple aim” of health care, by improving patient outcomes and access to care, and to make health care systems more cost effective.
For example:
In this 2014 study, a six-month feasibility study was conducted on eight patients with a history of Acute Exacerbation of CODP (AECOPD). Each patient was given a mobile phone to record major symptoms, such as dyspnoea, sputum color and sputum volume; minor symptoms such as cough and wheezing; and vital signs. During the trial, the rate of hospital admissions were significantly lower and there were fewer ED presentations and GP visits compared to a six-month matched period in the preceding year. Such results showed “the potential of home monitoring for [analyzing] respiratory symptoms for early intervention AECOPD.”
Similar to our previous Star Trek device, a company in Israel, Tyto Care, has developed a portal device that helps monitor all sorts of health parameters to let doctors diagnose patients remotely. Allowing your doctor to perform their job with accurate metrics about you or your child’s illness without having to resort to a in person visit. The Tyto device is currently going through the FDA clearance process, hopefully one day offering people the option of staying at home rather than visiting the clinic in most simple health situation.
“We are coming together at a pivotal time in the mobile healthcare industry. As health reform demands more focus on delivering quality outcomes and reducing costs, providers are turning to technology like remote monitoring to diagnose and treat more patients in ways that use time, money and human resources efficiently and effectively. Our shared vision is to become a worldwide leading remote monitoring company,” said Jon Otterstatter, President and Chief Global Strategy Officer of Preventice Inc.
6. Anti-Aging Drugs
The dream, or the nightmare, depending on how you take it, is living forever, or at least in the foreseeable future to 120+ years old. 2016 will be the year of a new anti-aging drug test that will enter trials which could see diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consigned to distant memory.
Scientists now believe that it is possible to actually stop people growing old as quickly and help them live in good health well into their 110s and 120s.
Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.
“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing”
Dr Jay Olshansky, University of Illinois Chicago
If successful it will mean that a person in their 70s would be as biologically healthy as a 50-year-old. It could usher in a new era of ‘geroscience’ where doctors would no longer fight individual conditions like cancer, diabetes and dementia, but instead treat the underlying mechanism – ageing.
The new clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME, is scheduled to begin in the US next winter. Scientists from a range of institutions are currently raising funds and recruiting 3,000 70 to 80 year olds who have, or are risk of, cancer, heart disease and dementia. They are hoping to show that drug slows the ageing process and stops disease.
Outlining the new study on the National Geographic documentary Breakthrough: The Age of Ageing, Dr Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois Chicago, said: “If we can slow ageing in humans, even by just a little bit it would be monumental. People could be older, and feel young.
“Enough advancements in ageing science have been made to lead us to believe it’s plausible, it’s possible, it’s been done for other species and there is every reason to believe it could be done in us.
“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing.”
7. Tooth Regeneration
Hey Kids, here is some candy! All kidding aside, this could be an amazing advancement if the technology holds true in the coming years.
Colorful fish found in Africa may hold the secret to growing lost teeth. In a collaborative study between the Georgia Institute of Technology and King’s College London, researchers looked at the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi in Africa, who lose teeth just to have a new one slide into place. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identifies the genes responsible for growing new teeth and may lead to the secret to “tooth regeneration” in humans.
“The exciting aspect of this research for understanding human tooth development and regeneration is being able to identify genes and genetic pathways that naturally direct continuous tooth and taste bud development in fish, and study these in mammals,” said the study’s co-author Paul Sharpe, a research professor from King’s College, in a press release. “The more we understand the basic biology of natural processes, the more we can utilize this for developing the next generation of clinical therapeutics: in this case how to generate biological replacement teeth.”
Another study from a Harvard team successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. The results were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Stem cells are no ordinary cells. They have the extraordinary ability to multiply and transform into many different types of cells in the body. They repair tissues by dividing continually either as a new stem cell or as a cell with a more specialized job, such as a red blood cell, a skin cell, or a muscle cell.
Dentures and dental implants may soon become a thing of the past. Stem cell research is making it possible to regrow your missing teeth! This is a much-needed medical advancement, especially considering that by age 74—26% of adults have lost all of their permanent teeth.
8. Lightbulbs that Disinfect and Kill Bacteria
Hospitals are known to be potentially dangerous place with lot’s of people with different elements and diseases. One company, Indigo-Clean has developed a technology using visible light that continuously disinfect the environment and bolsters your current infection prevention efforts.
How it works
The 405nm emitted from Indigo-Clean reflects off of walls and surfaces, penetrating harmful micro-organisms
The light targets naturally occurring molecules called porphyrins that exist inside bacteria. The light is absorbed and the excited molecules produce Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) inside the cell
405nm creates a chemical reaction inside the cell, similar to the effects of bleach
The Reactive Oxygen Species inactivates the bacteria, preventing it from re-populating the space
9. Electronic Underwear Preventing Bed Sores
Having elderly grandparents that have died from complications due to bedsores is extremely unfortunate, as much of these issues could be prevented. When patients stay motionless for days, weeks, or months they develop painful open wounds due to lack of circulation and compressed skin.
And believe it or not, bedsores can be deadly. Roughly 60,000 people die from bed sores and resulting infections every year, draining $12 billion from the U.S. medical industry.
Developed by Canadian researcher Sean Dukelow of Project SMART, the electric underpants—deliver a small electrical charge every ten minutes. The effect is the same as if the patient was moving on their own—it activates muscles and increases circulation in that area, and effectively eliminates bed sores, thereby saving lives.
10. Long Lasting Batteries for Medical Devices and Wearables
The need for power is evident in today’s world, for our houses, cars, and medical devices such as pacemaker batteries that typically need to be replaced with an expensive surgery. With the need for power-hungry devices comes innovation in the form of new technologies that will help provide the world with longer lasting, faster charging batteries.
Aluminum-Ion Batteries: Chemistry Professor Hongjie Dai from Stanford University and his team say their aluminum-ion battery prototype can fully charge a phone in one minute and maintain its strength through thousands of recharge cycles — over seven times as many cycles as current phone batteries. But fast charging times aren’t the only advantage this new prototype has over the standard lithium-ion battery found in most of our devices. Perhaps the battery’s most impressive quality is its flexibility, meaning it could work with any future devices that are curved or use bendable screens.
Micro Supercapacitors: Rice University researchers who pioneered the development of laser-induced graphene have configured their discovery into flexible, solid-state micro super capacitors that rival the best available for energy storage and delivery. Rice’s micro super capacitors charge 50 times faster than batteries, discharge more slowly than traditional capacitors and match commercial super capacitors for both the amount of energy stored and power delivered.
Foam Batteries: The future of batteries is 3D. Prieto is the first company to crack this with its battery that uses a copper foam substrate. This means these batteries will not only be safer, thanks to no flammable electrolyte, but they will also offer longer life, faster charging, five times higher density, be cheaper to make and be smaller than current offerings.
Skin Power: Researches from the National University of Singapore have created a replacement for batteries all together would be an electrode used to harvest the current caused by friction on the skin and clothes. The result is enough power, from a finger tap on skin, to power 12 LED bulbs. The future could mean there are no need for batteries in wearables or smart clothes. So how does it work? An electrode is used to harvest the current, so a 50nm-thick gold film is used. The gold film sits below a silicone rubber layer composed of thousands of tiny pillars that help create more surface area for skin contact, which creates more friction. Since the skin is a one of the triboelectric layers it means the device can be small. Scientists have already shown off a wearable powered by the device. Next gadgets to use it? Hopefully everything.
11. Health Informatics
More than half of US hospitals use some type of electronic records system, but only 6% meet all the federal mandates, according to a recent study out of the University of Michigan. According to researchers at the University of Chicago, 50% of health care dollars are wasted on inefficient record keeping processes. Electronic records have been shown to save large hospitals anywhere between $37 and $59 million. It streamlines the medical care process and lowers malpractice claims, and increases coordination between providers. Improvements still need to be made communicating patients between facilities as noted from referralMD, (Provider-to-provider communication software) where roughly 50% of all patients do not attend appointments, driving costs upwards, and lowering patient outcomes dramatically.
Practitioners and medical researchers can look forward to technologies that enable them to apply data analysis to develop new insights into finding cures for difficult diseases. Healthcare CIOs and other IT leaders can expect to be called upon to manage all the new data and devices that will be transforming healthcare as we know it.
Acquista Online La Prescrizione Di Perdita Di Peso Crediamo che i farmaci a volte possano essere molto urgenti da assumere. Se hai urgente bisogno di farmaci, possiamo anche fornirti una consegna espressa,
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