Technology Trends

A friend of mine who worked for free to help senior citizens to use computers once told me that the biggest hurdle was not technical — people can learn during all their lives — but physical. Many old people have trembling hands which prevent them to use a mouse to point and click on a small icon on a computer screen or a link on a browser page. Now, according to this article from ExtremeTech, IBM has unveiled a mouse adapter which treats these tremors as “noise” by filtering out the unintentional movements of the hand caused by a tremor. This new mouse will also help the ten million people which are affected by this genetic disorder every year, and who aren’t necessarily old. This adapter will be sold for about $100. Read more…

Let’s start with some pictures.

Here is how it works.

The new mouse treats the hand tremors as noise, and uses algorithms based on image-stabilization systems used in digital cameras.

[As you can see on the above pictures,] the mouse includes a physical dial to control the sensitivity of the mouse, as well as how quickly the user needs to double-click. Normally, these functions are handled by software controls — which require a mouse to adjust.

As I wrote above, this inability to precisely use a computer mouse doesn’t affect only the elderly.

Although tremors are usually associated with the elderly, a type of tremor called Essential Tremor is actually a genetic disorder that affects 10 million people per year, according to the International Essential Tremor Foundation (IETF).

This mouse adapter will be distributed by Montrose Secam, a British electronics company. You can buy it now for £67.50, 119.00 euros or $107.00, depending on where you live.

For more information, you can read these two articles from the Mercury News, “Algorithm box smoothes hand tremors on mouse,” and from the San Francisco Chronicle, “Helping hand for those with shaky hands.”

Finally, you might want to read this IBM press release, “Mouse adapter gives computer access to millions of hand tremor sufferers,” which offers additional details and links.

Sources: ExtremeTech Staff, March 14, 2005; Therese Poletti, Mercury News, March 14, 2005; Benjamin Pimentel, San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Computers
  
  
• Human Computer Interface
  
  
• Innovation
  
  
• Medicine
  

In “Wearable Computers You Can Slip Into,” BusinessWeek Online reviews several new unobtrusive wearable devices, such as a handbag with embedded chips. When this bag becomes available for about $150 in two or three years, it will remind you to grab your wallet or to pick an umbrella before going out. And according to research firm IDC, the clunky wearable computers which required users to be wrapped in wires like Christmas gifts are quickly becoming things of the past. The future of wearable computers is already here, especially for some health-care applications, such as a ’smart band’ that collects data on your physical activities and can be used as a weight-loss monitoring tool. But read more…

Let’s start with a bag designed by Gauri Nanda and fellow researchers at the MIT.

Gauri Nanda sees a wearable computer as a… handbag — one that’s built out of four-inch squares and triangles of fabric, with tiny computer chips embedded in it. Assembled together with Velcro that conducts electricity, these pieces form a bag that looks, feels, and weighs like your typical leather purse.

That’s where the similarities end: This bag can wirelessly keep tabs on your belongings and remind you, just as you’re about to leave the house, to take your wallet. It can review the weather report and suggest that you grab an umbrella — or your sunshades. This purse can even upload your favorite songs onto your scarf.

Of course, this kind of bag is using new technologies, such as RFID tags embedded in your wallet, or special fabrics, such as the Aracon fiber from DuPont. But the surprising thing is that — no pun intended — it will not break your wallet. Such a bag will cost only about $150.

Now, here is the ’smart band’ from BodyMedia, which is about to be deployed in fitness clubs.

Here, you can see how this works in the above image (Credit: BodyMedia). The unobtrusive ’smart band’ collects data on your physical activity, which is then processed by proprietary algorithms and finally displayed on a variety of devices.

Originally released three years ago as a tool for researchers — auto makers, for example, used it to understand stress in drivers — the band is about to enter the mainstream. Later this month, Apex Fitness Group, which distributes fitness products to 1,200 health clubs such as 24-hour Fitness, will begin promoting the band for consumers as a weight-loss monitoring tool [and under a cute trademarked name -- bodybugg.]

Then, there is a special shirt developed by VivoMetrics to monitor patients at hospitals, and which can also be used to accelerate new treatment trials.

Because of the volume of data it collects, the shirt can significantly reduce the number of participants in trials, as well as the trials’ duration. In the case of one study for a sleep drug, traditional methods like hooking up patients to various machines at a special sleep lab “would have been at least 10 times more expensive and would have taken 10 times longer,” says Steven James, a San Diego consultant to pharmaceutical companies. During this trial, 15 patients simply wore the shirts at home overnight. VivoMetrics sells a set of six shirts and related software and data recorders for $15,000.

Finally, BusinessWeek Online reports about the Nomad head-mounted display from Microvision, Inc. You can find more information about this device in a previous post from December 2004, “New Wearable Armyware.”

Sources: Olga Kharif, BusinessWeek Online, March 8, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Fashion
  


• Materials
  


• Medicine
  


• Pervasive Computing
  


• RFID
  


• Wearable
  

In this long article, CIO Magazine reports that some cities, such as Indianapolis, are creating regional health information networks to share medical records between doctors and hospitals to save lives and money. In the example of Indianapolis, the “emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network,” and 1,300 doctors have partial access to this network. The first goal of such networks is of course to save lives, but in the case of central Indiana, it also could save more than $500 million per year. Of course, there are many hurdles to overcome, many of them financial: finding money to fund the networks or convincing doctors to invest in new technologies. But the two biggest obstacles are human. First, less than a doctor over five is currently using electronic medical records (EMRs). And obviously, in our world where banks and payroll companies more or less routinely see some of their records leaked to the general public or even criminals, it’s a little bit scary to think about your medical records flying over not so secure networks. But read more…

Let’s focus on the Indianapolis example first.

In Indianapolis, the emergency rooms of the city’s five major hospital groups share patient data via an electronic medical network. And more than 1,300 doctors in the metropolitan area use an electronic messaging service, which is an extension of the ER system, to share laboratory results and other clinical information about their patients.

In Indianapolis, the three hospitals linked up to a pilot electronic medical network saved $26 per ER visit. And as the medical data-sharing system expands, the central Indiana region could save $562 million per year in health-care costs, says Dr. Marc Overhage, CEO of the nonprofit Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), formed to oversee that region’s data-sharing network.

Of course, it’s not that easy. You need to find money to deploy these networks, and many large departments of health or hospitals in the U.S. put their cash into other projects they think have higher priorities. And there also some local politics. Look at this example.

Doctors aren’t the only barriers to electronic information sharing. Over the past four years, those working to build Indianapolis’s medical data exchange have faced multiple roadblocks. According to Edward Koschka, CIO of the Community Health Network (a group of five hospitals in the Indianapolis area), the clinical messaging project was “doomed for failure” at three points over the past two years. The first time was when hospital CIOs met in June 2002 to talk about collaborating. “Everyone said, Wait a minute — this conflicts with my strategic plan for my hospital,” Koschka recalls. His team devoted three meetings to convincing the CIOs that they needed to collaborate on clinical messaging in order to reduce costs.

It’s also hard to convince doctors to invest money in these regional health networks.

Doctors must pay anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000 to buy hardware and software and transfer their paper records to an EMR, says Dr. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and a member of the organization working toward a statewide clinical data exchange in Massachusetts. Bates expects that insurers will reward doctors who share electronic records by paying them higher rates once they’ve installed the systems.

And it should be the hardest part, considering that doctors are not really using such systems today.

The biggest obstacle to medical information sharing, however, is the way that most doctors currently practice medicine. Right now, only 5 percent to 15 percent of doctors use electronic medical records (EMRs), and many physicians work in small practices with few extra resources or ties to large medical institutions. Doctors in such small practices don’t have the financial incentive to invest in the expensive hardware and software necessary to link into an electronic medical network.

But even if such medical networks are built, and save lives and money, will you trust them? Will your medical records be safe? Here is a doctor’s answer.

For Dr. Pierson in Whatcom County, the key to guaranteeing patient confidentiality is to offer patients and providers an audit trail of who has looked at the records. Under Whatcom County’s “shared care plan,” doctors and patients and their families have access to computerized records, and patients can note changes in symptoms or medications. If there is a breach in patient privacy, those responsible must be harshly punished, he says. “If someone breaches, they lose their job. There have to be significant penalties.”

So what’s your take? Do you think this kind of medical networks should expand? One personal clue: my answer is yes.

Source: Susannah Patton, CIO Magazine, March 1, 2005 Issue

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• IT
  


• Medicine
  


• Networking
  


• Privacy
  


• Security
  

A vast majority of long-term patients in the world don’t take their medication in time, intentionally or not. In the U.S. alone, this represents an additional $100 billion yearly expense due to unexpected emergency hospital admissions. It is therefore crucial to gather accurately patient medical data in real time. For this purpose, a team at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory has developed a mobile health toolkit to perform this task. With this toolkit consisting of a Java-based middleware and Bluetooth-enabled sensors, all the medical patient data can be wirelessly exported to a doctor’s office via a PC or a cell phone. Read more…

Here are some facts to start with.

About 55% of all long-term patients in the US and in Europe, it is estimated, do not take their medication (either not taking the prescribed medication at all or more than 14 hours late) Around 12% of all hospital admissions in the UK are due to this non-compliance, the damage to the US taxpayer is an estimated USD 100 billion a year. Most of the patients that do not comply are simply forgetful (about 10% deliberately do not want to take the medication).

So how can we solve this problem?

Gathering current patient medical data promptly and accurately is vital to proper health care. The usefulness of electronic data capture (EDC) has been demonstrated in applications such as the home monitoring of at-risk heart patients via devices that transmit blood pressure from the home to a central database. Removing transcription effort (and associated inaccuracies) alone is worth the institution of EDC; but the side benefit of timeliness offers the hope of identifying and responding to trends as they occur, perhaps preventing a dangerous event, instead of simply allowing its diagnosis after the danger has manifest.

This is why IBM has developed its mobile health toolkit, “for gathering measurement data from a range of devices, and present it to management software via a well defined, and easily implemented interface.”

This illustration shows various devices, such as “a Bluetooth attached blood pressure cuff (left) and pill box (right) sending data to the mobile phone via Bluetooth. The mobile hub software integrated into the mobile phone (center) forwards the data to a care centre for monitoring (screen in the back) and returns reminders or alarms in an emergency.” (Credits: IBM and a former article in ERCIM News, “Remote Monitoring of Health Conditions.”)

Here are some details about this toolkit.

The IBM mobile health toolkit provides a Java-based middleware — using J2ME MIDP 2.0 (Java Mobile Information Device Profile) and JSR 082 (Java APIs for Bluetooth) — running on a personal (mobile) hub device to which sensors can connect wirelessly. We can perform local processing on the data, and forward the result to one or more fixed network connections. Data-handling modules can easily be added to the MIDlet suite (application suite compliant with Java Mobile Information Device Profile) on the hub, as can drivers for new sensor devices.

Using a wireless link from the hub to the devices allows the hub to be placed in an unobtrusive location, saves the user from fiddling with cables, and saves the sensor manufacturer the trouble of finding an acceptable case location for the data connector. By requiring only Bluetooth, MIDP support, and a network connection from the hub, the range of suitable hardware choices for the hub extends from full PCs, through OSGi home gateway units, all the way to cellular phones.

For more information, you can visit the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory website, and more specifically, the IBM Mobile Health Toolkit page, which states the following.

Solutions based on the IBM mobile health toolkit can improve the quality of patient monitoring while reducing overall healthcare costs. Moreover, it ensures that more timely information is available to medical caregivers. Medication-compliance systems can leverage the toolkit as a basis for intelligent reminders. For example, patients can be prompted to take their medication if the system detects that it is overdue.

Finally, for a more relaxed tone — say, less corporate –, you can check the site of one of the IBM researchers involved in this project, Dirk Husemann.

Sources: Dirk Husemann and Michael Nidd, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, in ERCIM News No. 60, January 2005; and other IBM web pages

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• IBM
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Networking
  
  
• Pervasive Computing
  
  
• Sensors
  
  
• Wireless
  

After a patient has been hospitalized for a surgical intervention, he usually wants to return to his normal life. But doctors would like to monitor him to be sure that the operation was successful. How can they manage this without being too intrusive? In “Health Care Monitoring of Mobile Patients,” Italian researchers offer a three-layer networking solution. First, a body area sensor network would continuously record your cardiac activity or your body temperature. A second level would involve a home sensor network, including for example a PC wirelessly receiving this information. Finally, this home network would be able to alert an hospital network if needed. Right now, this whole idea is at the proof-of-concept level, but it really looks promising. Read more…

How can you monitor patients without asking them to come back weekly at the hospital after a cardiac surgery? The answer of the researchers from two different institutes of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa, the Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica (IFC) and the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) is to integrate several networks, from one located next to the patient, to remote ones, in hospitals which might be located in another part of the country.

The inner layer which provides monitoring support is organized as a body area sensor network. This network, hosted by the patient, combines the patient’s physiological data with information from the outer layers to support (basic) early diagnosis and produce (basic) alerts.

The outer layer (for example the patient’s domotic network) may include an environmental sensor network and one or more powerful nodes. Examples of such nodes could be an electrocardiograph offering diagnostic information or a PC receiving all the data and managing an advanced monitoring and alert detection service.

This layer interacts with outermost layer (the hospital network) to exchange physiological data, alerts and patient-related data. Wireless connections should be used where possible to support mobility and adaptability at the various levels of the network.

The system has been designed to minimize the burden of sensors on the patients and to optimize the amount of data to be transmitted over the different networks.

Of course, transmitting such sensitive data on public networks needs secure protocols. And the researchers are working on it.

Future work includes the study of dependable and secure communication protocols to connect the body area sensor network with domotic and hospital networks. These protocols should ensure confidentiality and protection against the transmission of malicious queries.

What do you think of this idea?

Source: Giuseppe Amato, Stefano Chessa, Fabrizio Conforti, Alberto Macerata and Carlo Marchesi, ERCIM News No. 60, January 2005

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Medicine
  


• Networking
  


• Pervasive Computing
  


• Sensors
  


• Wireless
  

In this short article, eWEEK writes that the next generation of biosensors will consist of small holograms costing only fractions of a cent. Prototypes developed by a U.K. company, aptly named Smart Holograms, include contact lenses that monitor glucose levels or thin badges that detect alcohol levels. Not only these holograms used as sensors will be cheap to produce, they’ll also require less training for nurses or police officers. This is because these holograms can be designed to show results graphically, such as morphing into an image of a green car if someone subjected to breath analysis is sober and can drive. Read more…

Here are selected quotes from the eWEEK article.

Prototypes have already been made for contact lenses that monitor glucose levels, thin badges that detect alcohol levels, and sticks that can tell, instantly, if milk has spoiled or become contaminated. The technology promises to be quicker and cheaper than tests used today. It will also require less training, because the hologram itself can be designed to show results graphically.

A test showing that fuel has been contaminated with trace amounts of water reads “dry” or “wet.” In a breath alcohol test intended for police offices, suspects breathe onto tiny cards that either show a green automobile or a red X, establishing whether a person is sober enough to drive.

This technology looks cheap and promising, according to Chris Lowe, a professor at Cambridge University, and co-founder of Smart Holograms.

One advantage of the technology is that each hologram costs only a fraction of a cent to produce. Another is the wide applicability. The holograms can detect pH to four decimal places and chemical concentrations of hormones and other biologically important substances. The samples tested do not need to be pure: The holograms can work in milk or even in stool samples from newborns, said Lowe.

Now, let’s turn to the company itself to see how holograms can be turned into biosensors. Here are some explanations provided on this page whose title is “Creating a Sensor Hologram.”

Sensors that rely on the ability of “smart” polymers to swell or contract when in contact with specific biological reagents, chemicals or physical forces, sometimes called volume holograms, are of significant interest. For example, bright wavelength changes produced by holograms fabricated in hydrophilic polymers offer immediate advantages as a facile and reliable means of measuring volume changes. Hologram gratings capable of exhibiting spectral effects from volume changes need to be of the so-called “Denisyuk” type.

For more information about Yuri Denisyuk, you can read this brief history of the holography.

[The figure above] illustrates the experimental set-up used to create Denisyuk-type holograms. Laser light returning from a plane mirror creates a classical standing wave pattern of nodes and antinodes or interference fringes spaced half a wavelength apart. The standing wave pattern is recorded in the polymer matrix that has been coated on a plastic substrate or glass microscope slide. After a conventional photographic development step, the fringe pattern is represented as a distribution of ultrafine (<20 nm diameter) grains of silver.

Is this technology as accurate as told by its promoters? We’ll see. However, it really seems it has a serious cost advantage over current technologies, so it has the potential to become widely used in a few years.

Sources: M.L. Baker, eWEEK, February 19, 2005; Smart Holograms website

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Biotechnology
  
  
• Holograms
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Nanotechnology
  
  
• Police
  
  
• Sensors
  

Nano-sized particles embedded with bright, light-emitting molecules have enabled researchers to visualize a tumor more than one centimeter below the skin surface using only infrared light. An interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Minnesota have imaged tumors within living rats by embedding fluorescent materials into cell-like vesicles called polymersomes, which are composed of two layers of self-assembling copolymers. According to the researchers, this imaging process has the potential to go even deeper. And “it should also be possible to use an emissive polymersome vesicle to transport therapeutics directly to a tumor, enabling us to actually see if chemotherapy is really going to its intended target.” Read more…

“We have shown that the dispersion of thousands of brightly emissive multi-porphyrin fluorophores within the polymersome membrane can be used to optically image tissue structures deep below the skin — with the potential to go even deeper,” said Michael J. Therien, a professor of chemistry at Penn. “It should also be possible to use an emissive polymersome vesicle to transport therapeutics directly to a tumor, enabling us to actually see if chemotherapy is really going to its intended target.”

“These polymers are also larger than phospholipids, so that there is enough space for the fluorophores, which are larger than the average molecule that is found inside cell membranes,” said Daniel Hammer, professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering at Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Another feature that makes emissive polymersomes so useful is that they self-assemble. Simply mixing together all component parts gives rise to these functional nanometer-sized, cell-like vesicles.”

Now, what’s next?

According to Therien, there is keen interest in developing new technology that will enable optical imaging of cancer tissue, as such technology will be less costly and more accessible than MRI-based methods and free of the harmful side effects associated with radioactivity. In this imaging system, the fluorophores can also be tuned to respond to different wavelengths of near-infrared light. This sets the stage for using emissive polymersomes to target multiple cancer cell-surface markers in the body simultaneously.

The research work will be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in its online Early Edition. As I’m typing this, the article is not yet online. Be sure to visit the site in a couple of days.

A patent application was filed in February 2004 for this invention named “Polymersomes incorporating highly emissive probes.” You can find technical details on this patent by visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office and search for it. As the patent is not yet approved, click on the left side of the screen on the “Status & IFW” link. On the next window, enter 10/777,552 as the application number. And in the next window, click on the “Published documents” tab.

Here is a direct link to the patent, but I can’t guarantee it always will work. So use the above method if this direct link leads you to an error. In the mean time, here is the abstract.

The instant invention concerns compositions comprising polymersomes, visible or near infrared emissive agents, and optionally a targeting moiety associated with a surface of the polymersome. The invention also relates to use of these compositions in the treatment of disease and in imaging methodology.

The “Images” section of the patent description contains 16 pages of drawings and pictures, including a black and white version of the photograph shown above.

Sources: University of Pennsylvania news release, via EurekAlert!, and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Biotechnology
  
  
• Chemistry
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Nanotechnology
  

A professor in computer science at the Utah State University (USU) is building robots to help people with disabilities, according to the Utah Statesman in this article. The story, which is more focused on the professor than robotics, carries several anecdotes, such as an embarrassing voice recognition system. After a blind man cleared his throat, the robot misinterpreted the sound as a sign that the man wanted to go to the bathroom. Later, every time a man cleared his throat before speaking, the robot changed directions and insisted to guide him to the restrooms. Even if the article is entertaining, this project at USU is far more ambitious. In fact, they want to design RFID-enabled robots mounted on mobile carts which will welcome blind persons at the entrance of a supermarket and guide them through the store. I bet you’ll never find those carts at a Wal-Mart store, but read more…

RFID has been around for almost 50 years and is still helping people. Harness the power of this technology and check out how you can get some RFID tags and RFID readers. The debate between RFID and barcodes continues on and it seems the technology for RFID may be beating out barcodes and the use of barcode scanners and barcode printers is waning. Get in on the RFID wave and see why this new technology appears to be better.

First, let’s look in detail at the failure of the voice recognition system.

Vladimir Kulyukin, assistant professor in the department of computer science, works jointly as a computer science researcher and for the Center for Persons with Disabilities. He said he had an especially embarrassing moment here at the Center for Persons with Disabilities involving a robot and a speech recognition system.

“We figured we could speak to the robot in English, and using the voice recognition system the robot would interpret the commands and obey them. I quickly realized that just wasn’t possible,” he said.

He said a blind man found the glitch in the system when he cleared his throat and the robot misunderstood the sound to mean the man wanted to go to the bathroom.

“Every time the man cleared his throat, the robot would immediately change directions and guide him into the bathroom,” he said. “It was an especially embarrassing moment in my research,” he added.

Of course, this is only a very small part of the project, which will deploy radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for use in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired.

“Simply speaking, we are trying to develop a robot for use as a mobile grocery cart used for the blind in supermarkets,” he said. “The robot would meet the blind person at the door and, by the push of a button, would lead the person to different areas of the store.”

Kulyukin said the robot would ideally be mounted on mobile carts, but the level of funding for the technology here at USU is not sufficient for marketing the project.

But they already built prototypes. And below are two pictures showing this RFID-equipped robotic guide (RG) for visually impaired people (Credit: Vladimir Kulyukin)

For more information, here is a link to Vladimir Kulyukin home page — which is not always available. From there, you’ll have access to various pages covering his research interests and his publications.

You might also want to read a paper named “RFID in Robot-Assisted Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired,” available as a PDF document (6 pages, 124 KB). Here is the abstract.

We describe how Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) can be used in robot-assisted indoor navigation for the visually impaired. We present a robotic guide for the visually impaired that was deployed and tested both with and without visually impaired participants in two indoor environments. We describe how we modified the standard potential fields algorithms to achieve navigation at moderate walking speeds and to avoid oscillation in narrow spaces. The experiments illustrate that passive RFID tags deployed in the environment can act as reliable stimuli that trigger local navigation behaviors to achieve global navigation objectives.

This paper also exists as a PowerPoint presentation (42 pages, 2.58 MB). The images above come from this presentation.

Sources: Lexie Kite, The Utah Statesman, Utah State University, January 26, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Innovation
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• RFID
  
  
• Robotics
  

Sociologists from Ohio State University (OSU) have mapped the structure of the adolescent romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents over 18 months. And they were quite surprised by the results, which showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, according to this OSU news release. These results have important implications for preventing the spread of STDs in teenage populations. Unlike in adult populations, in which there are cores of sexually active people who are the main conduits of disease and you can focus prevention efforts on them, you need to educate the whole teenage population. Read more about this very interesting research…

Here are the opening paragraphs of this news release.

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students — more than half of those who were romantically active at the school — in one long chain. (Check this figure for a representation of the network.)

Below are two other images showing these sexual networks (Credit for images and legends: American Journal of Sociology, University of Chicago Press)

Examining the pattern of indirect ties reveals the level of connectivity and redundancy of the network through which disease could travel. While [the above] figure reveals the existence of clusters of romantically involved students, it does not reveal how robustly connected these clusters are to one another. In general, structures like spanning trees are considered structurally fragile because the deletion of a single tie or a single node can break a large component into disconnected subgraphs. [...] Building from the temporally ordered indirect network shown in [the above] figure, [this other one below] reveals how the structure of indirect ties breaks into a set of smaller, mutually reachable sets when cut-points (single pathways between nodes) are eliminated.

Now, let’s look at some raw numbers about this long experiment.

Researchers interviewed 832 of the approximately 1,000 students at the school. Students were asked to identify their sexual and romantic partners in the past 18 months from a roster of other students attending their school. (Romantic relationships were ones in which the students named the other as a romantic partner. Non-romantic sexual partners were those in which the participants said they had sexual intercourse, but were not dating).

Slightly more than half of all students reported having sexual intercourse, a rate comparable to the national average. The researchers mapped the network structure of the 573 students involved in a romantic or sexual relationship.

Please read the full news release for more details. Here, I just want to attract your attention to another surprise phenomenon.

The surprising thing about the network at Jefferson High was the near absence of cycling — situations in which people have relationships with others close to them on the network, Moody said.

The lack of cycling seems traceable to rules that adolescents have about who they will not date. The teens will not date (from a female perspective) one’s old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend. This would be considered taking “seconds” in a relationship.

Not dating “one’s old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend”!!! I doubt I will ever be able to compose such an expression.

For more information, this research work has been published by the American Journal of Sociology (Volume 110, Number 1, Pages 44-91, July 2004) under the almost poetic title “Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks.” Here is a link to the abstract.

This article describes the structure of the adolescent romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents residing in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. Precise images and measures of network structure are derived from reports of relationships that occurred over a period of 18 months between 1993 and 1995. The study offers a comparison of the structural characteristics of the observed network to simulated networks conditioned on the distribution of ties; the observed structure reveals networks characterized by longer contact chains and fewer cycles than expected. This article identifies the micromechanisms that generate networks with structural features similar to the observed network. Implications for disease transmission dynamics and social policy are explored.

You also can read the full paper (PDF format, 48 pages, 519 KB). The illustrations above have been extracted from pages 18 and 20 of this document.

Sources: Ohio State University, January 24, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Medicine
  


• Social Networks
  

You might remember that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved in October 2004 the usage of a computer chip for humans, which can be inserted under our skin (read this Associated Press story to refresh your memory.) Maybe it doesn’t sound like a good idea to you, but some people take their jobs very seriously. John D. Halamka, the CIO of both the Boston’s CareGroup Health System and the Harvard Medical School, decided to take the plunge. Health Data Management reports that he’s now a RFID-Enabled CIO. He was successfully implanted with a VeriChip in the arm in December 2004 during a painless, 15-minute procedure. He said that RFID readers can identify him even if he wears several layers of clothing. He added he wanted to check how the chip could be used in future medical applications, such as retrieving information from a nonresponsive patient or checking if a medication or procedure was given to the correct person. Read more…

Here are some selected excerpts from the Health Data Management article.

John Halamka, M.D., does not have a chip on his shoulder. He has a chip in his shoulder.

Halamka, CIO at Boston’s CareGroup Healthcare System, has become the first volunteer to test an implantable radio frequency identification chip for medical use. The VeriChip, from Delray Beach, Fla.-based Applied Digital, was approved in October by the Food and Drug Administration for medical use in humans. In December, it was classified as a Class II medical device with special controls.

But why did he accept this implantation of a chip inside his body?

After Halamka met with VeriChip officials in November, he volunteered to evaluate the device and share his assessment with the vendor and the health care industry. He was implanted with the grain-sized chip on December 22, in what he called a painless, 15-minute procedure.

“The implantation required local anesthesia to a two-inch area of my arm between my elbow and shoulder,” he said Wednesday in an interview with Mobile Health Data. “The chip was inserted under my skin–between the fascia and the muscle. I can’t feel it.”

This CIO is not the only guinea pig in the U.S., but apparently, he’s the first person to get that this implant for medical purposes.

Nearly 40 people across the United States have been implanted with a VeriChip and are testing the device, said Richard Seelig, M.D., vice president of medical applications at Applied Digital. These volunteers, however, are using the system for identification and security access applications — not health care, he adds.

And just in case you would be tempted by a VeriChip, how much will it cost to get one?

Applied Digital will begin marketing the VeriChip system to clinicians and provider organizations next month, Seelig says. It will be classified as a prescription medical device and require a physician to perform the implantation.

The vendor will sell the chips to patients for $200 and the readers to health care organizations for $650, Seelig adds. The cost of the implantation will be established by a patient’s physician.

For more information about the company behind the Verichip, Applied Digital Solutions, you can check its website — if you enjoy Macromedia Flash sites — or go directly to this plain HTML page. You can even get a a $50 discount by filling this pre-registration form, aptly named Get Chipped™.

Finally, I want to reassure you: this implanted chip will not ruin your life. According to this short article from the South Florida Business Journal, “Halamka has since climbed several mountains, including Mount Washington in sub-freezing temperatures without any restrictions.”

Now I have two questions for you. Do you think such a chip could some day save your life? And if you answer is yes, would you be ready to accept such an implant?

Sources: Health Data Management, January 21, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Medicine
  
  
• Pervasive Computing
  
  
• Privacy
  
  
• RFID
  

Even if the Morse code usage has almost disappeared, it was a very efficient communication protocol. Now, researchers from several universities and drug companies in the U.K. have discovered that our cells are also using Morse-like signals to switch genes on and off. In this news release, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) writes that this discovery may have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry. Better and more efficient drugs would only deliver the signals to our cells that will activate a desired behavior. Sounds like science fiction? Read more…

This research is featured as the cover story of the January 2005 issue of Business, the quarterly magazine of the BBSRC. Here is a link to this full issue (PDF format, 32 pages, 1.08 MB). The article about “A Morse code in cells?” appears on pages 16 and 17.

Below is a picture and its legend as they appear in the magazine (Credit: BBSRC)

Composite picture showing a series of timelapse images of a neuroblastoma cell (SK-N-AS) stimulated with TNFalpha continuously for 360 minutes. The images show that in the cell, fluorescent RelA (an NF-kappaB protein) moves into and out of the nucleus three times. Individual pictures of the cell were superimposed over a graph (subsequently removed) that quantified the extent to which the fluorescent protein is localised in the nucleus versus the cytoplasm at different times after stimulation.

Now, let’s move to the essential details of the BBSRC news release.

Morse code is a simple, effective and clear method of communication and now scientists believe that cells in our body may also be using patterns of signals to switch genes on and off. The discovery may have major implications for the pharmaceutical industry as the signalling molecules that are targeted by drugs may have more than one purpose. The number of ‘dots and dashes’ being used by each signal could have different purposes, all of which could be modified by a drug.

The researchers, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and working at the Universities of Liverpool and Manchester and the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital, in collaboration with scientists at AstraZeneca and Pfizer, have studied transcription factors, the signalling molecules inside cells that activate or deactivate genes. They found that the strength of the signal is less important than the dynamic frequency pattern that is used.

The researchers focused on the response of a transcription factor involved in controlling the crucial processes of cell division and cell death. They found that the dynamics of the signalling molecule resemble the changes in calcium levels that encode other messages in cells. The results suggest how common signalling molecules could convey different messages through different frequencies.

Below is a series of pictures showing the results of an experiment which lasted several hours (Credit: BBSRC)

Neuroblastoma (SK-N-AS) cells, expressing EGFP (green) and RelA-Ds-Red (red), showing repeated movements of RelA-DsRed (RelA/p65 is an NF-êB subunit) between the cytoplasm and nucleus following treatment of the cells with TNFá (Time = minutes)

And here is the conclusion of Professor Julia Goodfellow, BBSRC Chief Executive.

This research is an example of a multi-disciplinary approach producing vitally important results. By combining expertise in cell biology, chemistry, mathematical modelling and bio-imaging the research team have discovered this coded signal that is going to inform the development of better, more effective drugs.

Sources: BBSRC news release, January 10, 2005; BBSRC website

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Biotechnology
  
  
• Chemistry
  
  
• Genetics
  
  
• Medicine
  

Will ‘podimaging’ become as popular as ‘podcasting’? Probably not, but several thousands of doctors are using the free OsiriX software to manage their medical images on their iPods and Macintoshes, according to this article from eWEEK. The radiologists who developed the software chose the Apple platform because of the high performance of the Mac graphics. With OsiriX, you can store and manipulate images on your iPod the same way you handle music files with iTune. And then, you can transfer these images or movies to any other Mac, using iChat to discuss a diagnosis with a colleague. Pretty neat…

Here is the introduction of the eWEEK article.

Radiologists [and other medical experts] are turning to iPods to deal with the hassles of managing medical images. They’re not listening to music, though; they’re looking at pictures.

Medical images are increasingly important in diagnosing everything from cancer to heart disease to sports injuries. And they are used extensively for research, including brain function and experimental treatments, but they also require large data sets, making storing and transferring images problematic.

Two radiologists recently developed open-source software, called OsiriX, to display and manipulate complex medical images on the popular portable devices called iPods. The most current version of OsiriX, which speeds up some processes and fixes crash-causing bugs, was released on Tuesday.

How did they get the idea of using an iPod?

Osman Ratib, vice chairman of radiologic services at UCLA, said the motivation for OsiriX came from problems storing images at work. “I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is — I always need more space,” he said. “One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40GB of storage on it. It’s twice as big as my disk on my laptop, and I’m using only 10 percent of it for my music. So why don’t I use it as a hard disk for storing medical images?”

In “iPod Helps Radiologists Manage Medical Images,” the Radiological Society of North America, Inc. (RSNA) gives other details.

[The other developer, Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, currently at UCLA,] set up the OsiriX software to automatically recognize and search for medical images on the iPod. When it detects the images, they automatically appear on the list of image data available — similar to the way music files are accessible by the iTune music application.

“It’s easy to use and you don’t have to worry about how to load and unload it from the iPod,” Dr. Ratib says. “But the real beauty of it is that I can use the images directly on the iPod. I don’t have to take the time to copy them to my computer. The iPod allows me to copy data from work to my laptop, but I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to.”

Dr. Ratib sees the iPod as a kind of giant memory stick, “The performance is amazing.”

On the OsiriX website, you can download the free software distributed under Open Source Licensing.

It is estimated that there are about 5,000 users worldwide. And the RSNA gives the results of a survey of OsiriX users.

Among the respondents to the survey, more than one quarter of the OsiriX users were radiologists, half of them at university hospitals. Forty-one percent of the total survey respondents said they use OsiriX daily, while 46 percent use it weekly. The most frequent usage was for research (53 percent), followed by presentations (37 percent), PACS at home (34 percent), PACS at work (29 percent), 3D station (26 percent) and fun (24 percent).

For more information, you also can read this Wikibook about the OsiriX Specifications.

Sources: M.L. Baker, eWEEK, January 5, 2005; RSNA News, December 2004; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Apple
  
  
• Medicine
  
  
• Software
  
  
• Storage
  
  
• Vision and Visualization
  

Robotics news are dominated these days by the $100 Robosapien toy or by the latest version of Honda’s ASIMO, that you will never been able to buy, even if you put a cool US$1 million on the table. But other recent news are worth mentioning. In Florida, according to the Miami Herald (free subscription), a small company is developing a robotic arm for surgeons which could save the healthcare industry $15 billion a year. And did you know that solar-powered autonomous underwater robots are now monitoring the waters of Lake George, N.Y.? On the other coast, PARC’s pliable ‘polybots’ will reconfigure themselves to act independently on earthquake scenes or in space. And in New Zealand, robot experts are creating servants of the future able to serve us the drink we want. Elsewhere, in Korea, the government wants to deploy two-legged networked robots in post offices later this year. In a long interview to the Korea Times, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Raj Reddy says the network-based robot is a great idea. Read more…

Please read all the articles linked above for more informatio. Below are only essential excerpts and pictures.

Let’s start with the robotic arm from Z-KAT.

The new firm is using technology licensed from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. ”This is what they call haptic robotics,” says Ferre. ”It is a human interactive tool,” so that the surgeon holding the arm has the touch and feel just as if her own fingers were holding the instrument.

The key is that the small arm can do a knee replacement with an inch-long incision, compared with cuts of 7 to 12 inches for traditional surgery.

The arm, trademarked as Tactical Guidance System, must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which Ferre expects to happen fairly quickly because the FDA has already given approval to a more basic version of the arm.

Now, let’s look at what Rensselaer researchers are doing with solar underwater robots.

A collaborative group of researchers are conducting experiments with underwater robots at Rensselaer’s Darrin Fresh Water Institute (DFWI) on Lake George, N.Y., as part of the RiverNet project, an NSF-funded initiative. The group is working to develop a network of distributed sensing devices and water-monitoring robots, including solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicles (SAUVs), for detection of chemical and biological trends that may guide the management and improvement of water quality.

[Additional note: you'll find all the details about the experiments done between October 17 and 22, 2004 here.]

PARC’s modular reconfigurable robots, or polybots are an entirely different story. Sometimes, they’re called morphing or mutating robots, but why would you use these reconfigurable robots?

“The problem with a conventional robot is you spend a lot of money building this one robot that does one task very well,” says Craig Eldershaw, [a research engineer at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).] “A modular robot can change its shape to adapt to a particular job. To wash dishes, it needs small delicate arms and fingers. For gardening, it could have a couple big strong arms to hold a shovel and big treads to move through mud.”

That kind of robotic domestic help is as much as three decades away, he acknowledges. But experimental search-and-rescue bots could be deployed in earthquake- or bomb-racked buildings within the next few years, he says.

Morphing robots also could become space explorers.

PARC recently took on a long-term NASA contract to develop a robotic arm that could move around the outside of a next-generation space shuttle freely and convert itself into several arms or a claw if the need arises. “Think in-space construction or assembly,” Mr. Eldershaw says. “Any time you can prevent someone having to go out into space in a suit you’ve won a lot of friends at NASA.”

Mark Yim, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who set up the modular robotics research group at PARC after completing his doctorate at Stanford, is leading a team that has taken on a NASA contract to build a morphing Mars explorer. To demonstrate the robot’s ability to assist with human life support, the experimental robot will be given the task of growing and nurturing a small plant inside a sealed environmental chamber.

It’s time to move to another continent, and to robots willing to serve us our favorite cocktails — maybe not this year — but in a foreseenable future.

“(In) 15 years’ time, I’d estimate something like this would serve drinks,” says Australian Tribotix robotics and electronics company engineering manager Steve Mitchell, putting a humanoid-shaped robot through its paces, literally. They’ll be that common.”

He remote-controls the 30cm-tallrobot and fascinated conference-goers cluster, watching it walk, bend forward and backward and move its arms, legs, torso and head independently. It can also slide skiing-style and perform acrobatics such as headstands.

Meanwhile, Korea is introducing a competitor with Honda’s Asimo. The 1.2-meter-tall KHR-3, which weighs roughly 55 kilograms, can walk by using 41 built-in motors and numerous joints and can also shake hands or lift objects with its five-fingered hands.

Korea’s officials also think they’re fast catching Japanese in robotics.

“In order to understand the humanoid development, we must split two facets of the mechanics and intelligence. Mechanically, we lag behind Japan 2-3 years, but we are almost on par with the country in intelligence,” a project manager said.

These robots will be introduced next year in five different projects, three for home usage and two for post offices.

To conclude this long post, I just want to say I was disappointed by the Korea Times’s interview of Raj Reddy, a person I really respect. His interview looks like a press release, very different from what you can read in a recent effort he made for promoting $250 computing devices for developing countries.

Sources: John Dorschner, The Miami Herald, December 6, 2004; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, December 6, 2004; Janet Rae-Dupree, Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal, December 10, 2004; Lee Matthews, Manawatu Standard, New Zealand, December 10, 2004; Kim Tae-gyu, The Korea Times, November 23 and December 19, 2004; Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 20, 2004

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• AI
  


• Environment
  


• Medicine
  


• Robotics
  

Here is December, and countless articles are published every day about gifts for the holiday season and forecasts about the year to come. Red Herring chose, cautiously, to focus on technology in the Top Ten Trends for 2005. By limiting itself to predictions for only next year, the online magazine doesn’t take much risks. However, the link above will lead you to no less than ten different stories. Some trends started this year, such as the war for searching files on your desktop or for putting double cores on computer chips. Other articles talk about Internet telephony, the battle for your digital home, fuel cells or biotech advancements. But the one which caught my eyes is about baby boomers and the exploding market for the global medical devices market, which could reach $160 billion worldwide next year. Read more…

Just for fun, here is the introduction of the Red Herring article looking at some past predictions.

Laying out technology trends is a treacherous undertaking. Those predictions can end up haunting the luminaries who pronounced them after they’ve proven to be ridiculous. Just consider these: Bill Gates was quoted in 1994 saying, “we’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time.” And George Gilder proclaimed in the pages of Forbes in 1992, “just as the old integrated circuit made transistor power virtually free, the new all-optical network will make communications power virtually free.”

Now, let’s jump to “Baby boomers left to their own devices,” aptly subtitled “As an aging population continues to seek the fountain of youth, the medical equipment market promises answers.” Here is the opening paragraph.

Living longer is no longer the goal. Living longer, while looking and feeling young, is now baby boomers’ big wish — and the market’s command. As more than one-quarter of the U.S. population, 40- to 60-year-olds represent huge potential profits for successful treatments.

Below are selected excerpts.

Along with cosmetic improvements, spine conditions are getting a lot of attention, as herniated discs, misaligned vertebrae, degenerative disc disease, and spinal fractures are quite common among the elderly. The boomers are a large and savvy group that demands solutions, however expensive they may be, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Alpesh Gandhi. “Baby boomers are more aware of a lot of the products and procedures,” he says. “They do more research and are more aware of what treatment they need.”

And the market for these medical devices is huge.

The global medical devices market is currently estimated at between $135 and $145 billion, according to Frost & Sullivan figures. The high estimate for 2005 is $160 billion. That makes it even bigger than biotech, which is now between $110 and $120 billion and is expected to grow to nearly $128 billion in 2005, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Vikram Wadhwani.

Nearly half of medical devices revenues, about 45 percent, represent the U.S. market — the world leader. Several factors help the U.S. dominate. Europe is slower to adapt new products where distribution is more complex, U.S. patients and doctors are more open to newer technologies, and technology that’s developed in other countries, namely Japan, eventually migrates over to the U.S. because it is a better market, according to Mr. Gandhi.

Red Herring adds that the approval process by the FDA is shorter for medical devices than for drugs, so it’s easier to make money for the companies investing in non-surgical solutions for example.

Another trend is finding non-surgical solutions, says Robert Bellas, a general partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, which invests heavily in seed-round medical device startups.

A big market for less-invasive procedures offers alternatives to cosmetic surgery. One startup that Morgenthaler helps fund through its incubator, The Foundry, is Thermage, based in Hayward, California. The company’s product, Thermacool, has been approved by the FDA and is being used by dermatologists and plastic surgeons. Thermage claims its non-surgical device uses radio frequency to increase the amount of collagen below the skin’s surface, promising similar effects to those of facelifts and liposuction, minus the downtime.

For more information, please read the whole collection of Red Herring articles — today and next year.

Source: Red Herring, December 13, 2004

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Economy
  


• Future
  


• Medicine
  


• Technology
  

Many recent studies conclude that we don’t sleep enough during our working week. For example, the National Sleep Foundation — the other NSF — says that 40% of adults admit that the quality of their work suffers when they’re sleepy. So what should we do? Take a nap during the day. But this practice is not widely supported by companies — to say the least. If you live in Manhattan, a small company, MetroNaps, has a solution for you and is even “profiting from nonproductiveness,” according to Wired News. All you have to do is to go to a suite in the 24th floor of the Empire State Building and pay $14 for a 20-minute nap in an adjustable and ergonomic chair. For people who don’t live in Manhattan, Metronaps can rent you one of its pods for installation in your office. But you’ll have to convince your HR department that you’ll be more productive after a nap. Try to get an appointment in the morning, when you don’t need this refreshing nap. Read more…

Before going further, where will you take this nap?

Now, why do we need naps during our working days?

According to the stats on America’s need for sleep, plenty of people could use a nap. More than 50 percent of Americans are sleep-deprived, nap expert and Boston University professor Bill Anthony said, and the average American gets fewer than seven hours of sleep per night — less than the prescribed gold standard of about eight hours, Anthony said.

Sleepy employees can be bad for business, encouraging errors and injury. People who nap — be it for a few minutes or a few hours — can improve their mood and productivity, Anthony said.

But very few companies have nap rooms, and napping at work is not even considered as acceptable behavior by lots of companies. This is why Metronaps developed its concept.

Enter MetroNaps, where company creators Arshad Chowdhury and Christopher Lindholst are hoping Manhattanites looking for a midday pickup will stop by their office, kick back in one of their eight adjustable chairs and catch a light snooze, for $14 a pop.

People appear to be biting, as a new store is opening in Canada’s Vancouver International Airport in December. MetroNaps hopes to franchise its business model to other locations in the near future, and is exploring the possibility of leasing the nap pods to companies for employee use.

The company spent several years to refine the nap environment, paying particular attention to sound and light in the nap room.

And apparently, this napping concept is well received.

All different kinds of people come to nap, Lindholst said. While many of them are employees of the hundreds of businesses located within the Empire State Building, local teachers, Broadway actors and people from nearby firms also come in, as do tourists. Some building residents have sent their own employees over to MetroNaps and allowed them to expense the experience, Lindholst said.

“A lot of people who come here, they say … that they have been looking for a place like this. Sometimes they take naps in their office. For a lot of them it’s about time something like this came” along, Lindholst said.

So, now you have two reasons to go to the Empire State Building while you’re in New York.

First, take the elevator to the 86th floor and think about the 1957 movie from Leo McCarey, “An Affair to Remember,” in which Cary Grant waited in vain for Deborah Kerr. Then, take the elevator down to the 24th floor and take some rest.

Sources: Rachel Metz, Wired News, November 15, 2004; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Economy
  


• IT
  


• Medicine
  


• Movies