The prototype injector uses an electromagnetic actuator to propel fluids at up to the speed of sound. I know that that actually sounds like more pain, but actually the injector’s nozzle is only about as wide as a mosquito’s proboscis, and mosquito bites are far lower in the pain scale compared to needle injections.

Another advantage of this device is that the velocity of the delivery of a drug can be adjusted by controlling the current applied to the actuator. Meaning it can be turned into a weapon be adjusted depending on a patient’s skin.

Head to MIT News to inject more data into your brain.

[via DVICE]

The surgeons took healthy nerves from the man’s body and used them to bridge the damaged nerves affecting his hands. The operation was performed at the Washington University School of Medicine, and the doctors hope that the operation could prove to be a breakthrough for people suffering from spinal cord injuries.

Once the new nerves were connected to the damaged areas, the man received extensive physical therapy. Eight months after the operation, he was able to move the thumb and fingers of his left hand, and after 10 months he was able to move the fingers of his right hand. Prior to the surgery, the man had limited movement in his arms, but lacked the ability to grasp or hold things in either hand. The man is now able to feed himself and write to a limited extent. Unfortunately, they cannot restoring truly “normal” function using this procedure. In this instance, for example, the man had to teach his mind to use a nerve that normally bends the arm and elbow to make the grasping hand movements.

[via Journal of Neurosurgery via Guardian]

The machine is relatively lightweight at 7kg (approx. 15lbs.) including its battery, which can power the machine for up to 300 uses per charge. The machine will of course be a boon in emergency situations and in remote areas.

But the best thing about this machine is that, as YouTuber rubbermuck noted, it looks like something that the Ghostbusters would use. When there’s something strange, in your right boob, who you gonna call? The doctor!

[via DigInfo]

Scientists say they’re completely safe, but if you’re not comfortable with chomping down food that’s partially laboratory-made, then you might find the Elephant Nose concept interesting.

It’s a small, pen-shaped device that “smells” your food for the presence of any genetically modified organisms. Its designer, Junhyun Kim, explains: “Many people are concerned about the health effects associated with the consumption of GMOs. Elephant Nose was designed to identify the state of foods (GMO/natural, fresh/stale, and so on) using artificial nose technology.”

Information about the food is then flashed on the Elephant Nose’s display.

The device, which is also a 2011 red dot design concept winner, has huge potential. What do you think?

[via Yanko Design]

The guys over at vogmask are offering their organic microfiber protective masks in a variety of stylish patterns, and have even covered one with a bunch of 8-bit Invader-style icons. But these aliens aren’t here to destroy your bases, they’re designed to keep dust and allergens out of your lungs, and clean air in.

Yes, I know they’re not the official Space Invaders aliens, but they capture the spirit of the game – without need for silly licensing deals, right? They still get the point across, and are certainly way better than some plain old white paper mask.

If you’re into retro gaming, and also want to keep all sorts of nasty stuff out of your nostrils, head on over to vogmask now, and grab an 8-bit dusk mask for just $20 (USD).

I usually relieve myself from the stress by going for a massage after work. But why not get a massage while you’re at work? I don’t mean calling your masseuse and booking one of the conference rooms for your break. Why do that when you can just have the uPixie give you one?

This is OSIM’s latest gadget in its product line that includes advanced massage chairs. Now they’re moving into the field of portable massagers with uPixie, which makes use of EMS (Electronic Muscle Stimulation.)

The cool thing about the uPixie is that you can sync the massage up with your computer’s music player, so it delivers a mix of taps, squeezes, and kneads that’s in tune and just right. It’s even compatible with both Windows and Mac systems.

The uPixie retails for $165 (USD), but is current on sale for just $99 at Osim’s site.

[via Gizmag]

The FuelBand is the natural evolution of the Sportband, that has been on the market since 2008. The FuelBand can track all of your activities, and boils them down to a simple metric called “NikeFuel”. The band allows users to easily toggle between time, distance, calories burned and “Fuel.”

You can also establish goals for your fitness, and as you accomplish then, the FuelBand LED lights turn from red, yellow to green. It’s made frome durable rubber, plastic, magnesium and stainless steel, and is water-resistant, so it’s fine in the shower or rain (but not safe for the swimming pool, ocean or tub).

The FuelBand comes equipped with built-in USB, an accelerometer and a tracking algorithm.  It syncs wirelessly with your iPhone over Bluetooth, and can track your progress on either an iPhone app or the Nike+ website. You can also share your achievements on Facebook and Twitter.

The Nike FuelBand already sold out of its first batch of pre-orders for $149 (USD), and expects to start shipping in late February.

[via Cool Hunting]

And if you’re the type who sometimes eats dinner while you’re streaming some videos or surfing the Internet, then you know for a fact that your keyboard is filthy. Now for regular, healthy people like you and me, that might be okay. But if this keyboard is in a more sensitive environment, say a hospital or in some other medical setting, then it’s a huge no-no.

To answer the need for a truly clean and self-sanitizing keyboard is the Vioguard, which has now been approved by the FDA. The Vioguard has a proximity sensor that will eject the keyboard when there’s a human who will presumably type something close by. When it’s not in use, the keyboard will then be housed in a UV resistant receptacle where the keyboard will be exposed to a constant stream of UV light.

The Vioguard uses 80W when it’s sanitizing the keyboard actively, and 3W when it’s on standby. No word on pricing yet, but I have to say… Now this is neat.

[via MedGadget via Oh Gizmo!]

The team is working on a contact lens which non-invasively monitors blood sugar levels without constantly stabbing yourself with a needle. The scientists have already figured out a way to build a glucose sensor into a contact lens, as well as lenses with built in radios and antennas, which can transmit information wirelessly. In the short term, the plan is to combine these technologies and transmit data to a wireless device.

While none of the current lens components have a built-in display, the team envisions a day where the lens itself would provide its wearer with heads-up information, without need for any additional components. Sure, it sounds a bit like science fiction, but with a real-world medical problem driving research, it’s possible the development of such wondrous things will receive investment and make it to market sooner than we think.

Autom will cost you $199(USD) and the weight loss service, which includes nutrition help, is $20 a month. Despite what the video says about pre-ordering, Autom is available now, and you can buy one here.

[via TechCrunch]

Designed by Yu-Hsin Lin, Chu-Che Chang and Shang-Hsuan Lu, the Tooth Guardian would have a tiny CCD camera on the backside of its head, capturing a real-time image of your teeth and gums as you brush. An LED ring encircles the camera lens and automatically turns on when you place the toothbrush in your mouth.

The toothbrush would wirelessly transmit its images to an LCD screen built into your mirror, so you can see how good a job you’re doing keeping your choppers pearly white.

By installing the camera on the flip-side of the head, it allows the bristles to be easily replaced, but means you won’t see the surface you’re brushing right now, but what you need to brush when you flip the toothbrush over. Still it’s a great idea for making sure you’re doing a good job when brushing. When done, the Tooth Guardian stows in a handy UV sanitizer to help kill any extraneous germs.

While the Tooth Guardian design was a recipient of a 2011 red dot design concept award, there’s no word on if or when it will be produced. However, everything here is readily available technology, so I don’t see why someone can’t bring these to market sometime soon.

Apparently, the UP has a tendency to not work for some users. Jawbone notes that it has found that there are a couple of capacitors that are bad in some units and affect performance. If you purchased the UP and haven’t been happy with it, Jawbone announced today that it would give you a full refund.

Even better than a full refund, Jawbone doesn’t want the UP back. You can get your money back and keep the product; it’s rare to get an offer like that. Of course if your UP isn’t working, getting a refund and getting to keep the device isn’t as nice as it sounds, since you’re still stuck with a broken gadget. I wonder if Jawbone will fix the device and offer it up for sale again, since it did actually sound pretty cool.

The technology is being developed as part of Project Assist, with the ultimate goal of creating robots that will assist quadriplegic people. Knowing this makes no difference to me, and the whole thing is still creepy. In the experiment captured in the video below, the goal was for a robot to transfer a ball from a human arm and through a hoop. The team attached four electrodes into the arms of five slaves rebels test subjects. A Fujitsu humanoid robot then “took over” – i.e. zapped – the subjects’ arms, making the poor fleshbag move his elbow and open his fingers to surrender the ball.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The audience at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) “let out a gasp” when the researchers presented the experiment. That’s already a crowd of robotics experts and enthusiasts. When asked if the procedure was safe or if it could be more comfortable, lead researcher Bruno Vilhena Adorno said, “You get used to it.” Clearly Adorno is a robot.

[via IEEE Spectrum via Engadget]

Industrial designer René Lee envisioned the Scale² (aka the “Scale Scale”) as a single adaptable scale which works with humans, animals, suitcases or various other things. Instead of requiring a different size scale based on the footprint of its subject, the Scale² can accommodate a variety of sizes.

The device has a stupid-simple user interface, with icons for people, pets or luggage on the face. Simply press the appropriate icon, and the Scale² automatically opens up to accommodate its subject.

In addition to displaying weight, Scale² would display Body Mass Index, as well as sync with your smartphone or the Internet to track weight loss, and can store multiple user profiles. I also think the color-coded weight tracker is brilliant.  When you lose weight, the display is in green, while weight gain would result in a nasty red display.

While I’m not sure how often I really need to weigh my dog or cat, I could see weighing my baggage as a more common practice these days with the ridiculous surcharges airlines are tacking on these days. Even if it’s not a device you use every day, the Scale² is definitely a clever bit of industrial design, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it manufactured some day.

[via I.D.]

But how would you like it if your computer mouse could do more than just let you click or drag and drop objects on your screen? Researchers from the Tokyo Metropolitan University have come up with a device that’s just about the size of a computer mouse that can tell you just how stressed you are. In fact, they’ve actually built a prototype version inside of a mouse.

It does so by bouncing off infrared light off of your fingers and measuring the bloodflow in your digits. It then analyzes the variations in your circulation. Bloodflow itself isn’t what determines if you’re stressed or not, but a correlation actually exists between the stability of your cardiac rhythm and the amount of certain stress-related hormones in your body.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Who knows, we just might see this technology incorporated into the computer mice of tomorrow. Although personally, I wouldn’t want to know how stressed I am, as it would just probably stress me out even more if I found out.

[DigInfo.TV via Oh Gizmo!]

Brennan was motivated by the number of post-diagnosis deaths of patients afflicted with tuberculous pericarditis, a condition affecting about 2% of TB patients that could lead to cardiac arrest. He wanted to develop a cheap and easy way for patients to record their heartbeats on their own. The prototype you see above was made using a headset and an egg-cup.

A rubber O-ring and a piece of clear plastic are attached to the listening end of the egg cup to “ensure a good seal” to a patient’s chest. The custom software developed by Brennan, Clifford and Springer lets users record the phonocardiogram – the sound from the heart – then send the file to a specialist. It also has a built-in signal processor so it can identify poor recordings and ask the user to repeat the procedure, as well as a custom algorithm to “reliably identify heart rate and heart sounds.”

Brennan and company conducted a clinical trial from January to April of this year and compared the results that their device – connected to a Nokia 3110 Classic and then to an iPhone 3G – obtained with those from an actual electronic stethoscope. Amazingly enough the readings from the lowly Nokia bested the ones from the dedicated stethoscope, although the former also had a lot of low quality recordings. Brennan isn’t stopping here – he and Springer are working on an Android app version of their software. He also wants to see if their invention can be used to analyze other heart-related diseases.

[University of Oxford via Medgadget via Ubergizmo]

Actually no, unscrew that. Because Erik Borg’s Food Allergen Detector is still a concept. A very practical one. It works like a digital nose, sniffing food and then providing a simple notification – a red or a green light – to indicate the presence of any of the eight most common causes of food allergy: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Unfortunately Borg didn’t go into the science/technology/wizardry behind the Food Allergen Detector. I’m no food technologist or chemist either, so I don’t know how feasible this gadget is with today’s technology. But I’m sure that if it were produced, this gadget would be a commercial success and more importantly could save millions of lives.

[via Knega Design via Notcot]

But one reason I disliked donning them was that it seemed to scare people who saw me sporting it.

Maybe it’s because they can’t tell I’m smiling as they approach. Maybe it’s because some people assume the worst if they see someone wearing a face mask. Or maybe it might be because I have creepy/scary/freaky eyes (who knows?)

Well, the Masclear Face Mask (JP) clears all that up because it’s literally a clear mask. Instead of a fibrous or cloth mask, Masclear is actually a transparent plastic mask that can serve the same purpose (ie. it keeps a person’s saliva and breath from spreading by serving as a barrier.) It’s also available in two sizes, small and large, to make sure that it’ll fit the wearer just right.

[via InventorSpot via Oh Gizmo!]

Jawbone has been developing this product for about 2 years, so they expect it to be big. The only problem is the online component of all this health-related data. I wouldn’t want my own medical data in the cloud. I also don’t want Big Brother checking up on me or Jawbone selling this data to the highest bidder (imagine if it finds itself into the hands of insurance companies). Other than that, I can see this being useful for many people. Apparently, the more you wear it, the better it gets. Sounds like it can “learn” as it collects more data about your behavior.

Jawbone hasn’t revealed the price, but it will ship for iOS and Android devices sometime later this year.

[via Wired]

The patient had late stage cancer in his trachea with a tumor that continued to grow. There was no suitable donor trachea available so the docs at Karolinska University Hospital in Huddinge, Stockholm, by Professor Paolo Macchiarini, of Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet, and colleagues grew and implanted the world’s first artificial trachea for the patient. The cool part is that since the artificial trachea was made from his own cells there was no rejection and no immunosuppressive drugs were needed.

The synthetic scaffold was seeded with the donor stem cells and then grown inside a bio-reactor for two days before being implanted into the patient. So far, there have been no complications after the surgery. The team also thinks that this procedure would be particularly important in the care of children since donor tracheas for kids are rare.

[via ScienceDaily]