Lifeboat Foundation

Forget flexible, get stretchable.

We’ve had curved displays for a while now, but what about stretchy ones? Samsung says it’s making progress building screens “that can be stretched in all directions like rubber bands,” and that the first applications for this material could be in building flexible health tech.

The company’s researchers recently created an OLED display that can be stretched by up to 30 percent while operating as normal. As a proof of concept, engineers integrated this display into a stretchable heart rate monitor that can be stuck onto the skin like a Band-Aid.

Continue reading “Samsung shows off stretchable OLED screen in prototype heart rate monitor” »

NSW Health is the latest Australian government entity to confirm being impacted by a vulnerability in the Accellion file transfer system.

A dozen states — many of them in the Northeast, including Maine, Massachusetts and Connecticut — have already reached a benchmark of at least 70 percent of adults with at least one vaccine dose, a goal President Biden has set for the nation to make by July 4. But in the South, that marker is nowhere in sight for several states.

In 15 states — including Arkansas, the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana — about half of adults or fewer have received a dose, according to a New York Times analysis. In two states, Alabama and Mississippi, it would take about a year to get one dose to 70 percent of the population at the current pace of distribution.

Public-health experts and officials in states with lower vaccination rates say the president’s benchmark will help reduce cases and deaths but is somewhat arbitrary — even if 70 percent of adults are vaccinated, the virus and its more contagious variants can spread among those who are not.

Researchers at DTU Health Tech have developed a new material that can facilitate a near-perfect merger between machines and the human body for diagnostics and treatment.

A DTU research team consisting of Malgorzata Gosia Pierchala, Firoz Babu Kadumundi, and Mehdi Mehrali from #TeamBioEngine headed by Alireza Dolatshahi-Pirouz, have developed a new material—CareGum—that among other things has potential for monitoring motor impairment associated with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s.

The White House recently announced its vision for an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. RAND researchers explain what it might take to ens… See More.

DARPA also maintains an extremely high tolerance for failure. The modest budgets of the NIH, combined with an enormous pool of applicants, force these institutions to bet on low-risk research that guarantees incremental progress. ARPA-H could take a different approach than NIH by accepting a much higher tolerance for failure, so that researchers are not discouraged from dreaming big.

The scientific methods behind the products of ARPA-H might gain public trust if the agency made a point of being transparent and accessible. Consider how the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine was met with incredulity and suspicion, slowing progress toward herd immunity. An investment in ARPA-H could accelerate the time it takes to get innovative ideas from “bench to bedside,” but it could benefit from informing the public about incremental advancements in a way that is easy to understand.

Continue reading “Biden’s Proposed New Health Agency Would Emphasize Innovation. Here’s How It Might Work” »

HSE doesn’t expect health services to return to normal for “a number of weeks” as it continues to deal with the fallout of the ransomware attack against critical IT infrastructure.

Scientists may have found a promising new treatment for Covid-19 after an experimental oral antiviral drug demonstrated the ability to prevent the coronavirus from replicating, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday, citing a new study.

The drug, called TEMPOL, can reduce Covid-19 infections by impairing an enzyme the virus needs to make copies of itself once it’s inside human cells, which could potentially limit the severity of the disease, researchers at the NIH said. The drug was tested in an experiment of cell cultures with live viruses.

“We urgently need additional effective, accessible treatments for COVID-19,” Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, wrote in a statement. “An oral drug that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from replicating would be an important tool for reducing the severity of the disease.”

Summary: Findings of a new study could help to design better strategies to improve sleep in workers with atypical work schedules.

Source: McGill University.

Getting enough sleep can be a real challenge for shift workers affecting their overall health. But what role does being an early bird or night owl play in getting good rest? Researchers from McGill University find a link between chronotype and amount of sleep shift workers can get with their irregular schedules.

Circa 2017

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