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Category: health – Page 368

Wireless movement-tracking system could collect health and behavioral data

We live in a world of wireless signals flowing around us and bouncing off our bodies. MIT researchers are now leveraging those signal reflections to provide scientists and caregivers with valuable insights into people’s behavior and health.

The system, called Marko, transmits a low-power radio-frequency (RF) signal into an environment. The signal will return to the system with certain changes if it has bounced off a moving human. Novel algorithms then analyze those changed reflections and associate them with specific individuals.

The system then traces each individual’s movement around a digital floor plan. Matching these movement patterns with other data can provide insights about how people interact with each other and the environment.

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After eating raw rodent’s kidney for ‘good health,’ couple dies of bubonic plague, sparks quarantine

A Mongolian couple died from the bubonic plague after eating raw marmot meat, sparking a quarantine that trapped tourists for days, officials said Monday.

According to AFP, the couple died May 1 in a remote area of the country’s Bayan-Ölgii province, which borders China and Russia.

A six-day quarantine of 118 people who had come in contact with the couple, including locals and a number of foreign tourists, had been lifted as of Tuesday, Ariuntuya Ochirpurev, a World Health Organization official, told the BBC.

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AI can detect depression in a child’s speech

A machine learning algorithm can detect signs of anxiety and depression in the speech patterns of young children, potentially providing a fast and easy way of diagnosing conditions that are difficult to spot and often overlooked in young people, according to new research published in the Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

Around one in five suffer from anxiety and depression, collectively known as “internalizing disorders.” But because children under the age of eight can’t reliably articulate their emotional suffering, adults need to be able to infer their mental state, and recognise potential mental health problems. Waiting lists for appointments with psychologists, insurance issues, and failure to recognise the symptoms by parents all contribute to children missing out on vital treatment.

“We need quick, objective tests to catch kids when they are suffering,” says Ellen McGinnis, a at the University of Vermont Medical Center’s Vermont Center for Children, Youth and Families and lead author of the study. “The majority of kids under eight are undiagnosed.”

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5,000 Years in The Making

Dear Colleagues.

ReWheel, Inc. was founded to save energy based on a simple truth that wasting energy is extremely not smart … as well as very damaging to our planet’s health.

Most of us are either scientists or believe in science. And that is how we know that we are losing the war against climate change. This war will not be won by any one technology but by our combined efforts. To protect our planet for our children and their children, and those who comes after, we need to act.

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Finally, another effective drug for kids and teens with type 2 diabetes

Results of a recently completed clinical trial of a potential drug to treat Type 2 diabetes in children were announced Sunday [April 28] at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2019 meeting in Baltimore, Md. The New England Journal of Medicine also published the findings. Study coauthor Jane Lynch, M.D., FAAP, professor of pediatrics at UT Health San Antonio, said the drug, liraglutide, in combination with an existing medication, metformin, showed robust effect in treating children studied in the Ellipse trial.

Currently only two drugs, metformin and insulin, are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes in children. By comparison, more than 30 drugs are approved to treat this form of diabetes in adults.

“We’ve not been able to get drugs approved for children beyond metformin and insulin,” Dr. Lynch said. “This adult diabetes medication was very effective in our trial of youth with Type 2 diabetes and was well tolerated. We urgently need other options for medical treatment of Type 2 diabetes in our youth under age 18. If approved, this drug would be a fantastic new option to complement oral metformin therapy as an alternative to insulin for our youth and adolescents with Type 2 diabetes.”

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Researchers develop secure method for sending sensitive personal data from wearable tech

Smart watches. Pacemakers. Internet-connected glasses. These are devices designed to make life easier. And yet, all this wearable technology can be hacked. The devices send personal health information to your smartphone over the airways, so anyone with the know-how could scoop it up and steal it. But now, researchers at Northeastern have a better, more secure idea: Send data through your body.

Associate professor Kaushik Chowdhury worked with a team of researchers from the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil to develop a safe, hacker-proof method to transmit sensitive data.

“The truth is, no matter what I do when it comes to wireless devices, I’m radiating the signal through the air,” Chowdhury says. “There is the danger that the signal can be jammed, or analyzed by someone else. Our method secures this so it can’t be leaked.”

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Non-thermal plasma: new technology could kill 99.9% of the deadly germs in the air

You can live without food for three weeks and without water for up to three days. But you can’t live without air for more than three short minutes. It’s not just the abundance of air that matters – the quality is essential, too. Unfortunately, air can be contaminated with dangerous germs known as airborne pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses.

Airborne diseases are very easily transmitted, and can result in respiratory illness that can be life threatening. It’s therefore no wonder that outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases are a major public health concern, and that researchers are working hard to come up with technologies to provide clean air. So far, however, such technologies have had limited success.

Now a new study suggests that non-thermal plasma – a cool gas made up of electrically charged particles, despite having no overall charge – could inactivate airborne viruses and provide sterile air. Although the technology has a long history and many applications (in medicine and food industry), this is a completely new use for it.

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Heavy metals like arsenic and lead found in 45 packaged fruit juices, report finds

A new report out Wednesday says some popular fruit juices may contain heavy metal contaminants like lead, arsenic, and cadmium. Consumer Reports tested 45 packaged fruit juices and found measurable levels of heavy metal in every product. Long-term exposure to these metals could cause serious health risks, including kidney disease and certain types of cancer. Anna Werner reports.

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