Category Archives: Technology

Not only is the Home Healthcare market growing in standard services of providing medical staff at home, it is also now growing up the value chain of providing Critical Care in the home environment. The benefits of such services are numerous: from being able to set up ICU facilities inclusive of relevant medical equipment to services of competent nursing and other staff. Today, a number of ailments that fall under the category of Critical Care are being treated at home.

For Critical Care to be implemented, it is imperative that various elements of technology are leveraged to successfully achieve the following:-

Positive patient experiences

Creating an environment for better outcomes of the treatment

Building efficiency in operation-intensive business to provide significant scaling up of the endeavor

While Information Technology is pervasive and ubiquitous in various fields and industries, there have also been a lot of advances in technology related to healthcare. Today, there are a number of devices that allow monitoring of the patients functions and emergencies and also integrate with IT devices such as mobile devices. They help to create a system where information can be captured in near real-time, assimilated and collated for distribution to the stake holders for appropriate actions. A few of such modern technologies that are making way in the Healthcare domain are as follows:-

ECG embedded in the smartphone case that helps interpret test results via an App and facilitates secured sharing of data with clinicians (NICE Evidence Review)

Tremor spoon for Parkinsons incorporating sensors and data analytics on how Tremor characteristics and severity change over time

Smart Inhalers that sense the location and surrounding air providing insights into Asthma attacks

All of the above technologies help in monitoring various parameters as relevant to the patient so that timely intervention can be made for better outcomes.

In addition to the above, there are also various sensor-based devices in the market that detect situations in an ongoing treatment and emergencies, for e.g., detection of a fall along with the precise location. It was estimated in 2014 that remote patient monitoring technologies accounted for over $ 30 billion.

Other important aspects to note are that services being delivered at home for Critical Care are in remote places as compared to a centralized facility in a hospital. While Home Healthcare increases the focus on the patient, it has been recognized that monitoring of services at these remote locations can be achieved through implementation of technologies. Data can flow through a network connecting these remote locations to hubs of centralized facilities where patient specific dashboards can be created and shared with relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem. The most effective model for delivering Critical Care at home is an integrated approach that involves the hospital, physician/the treating doctor, nursing and care staff at home and the family members of the patient.

With the use of inter-operable technologies, only bytes of relevant information can be shared with the stakeholders. It is well known that physicians and treating doctors lead very busy lives and do not have sufficient time to browse through mounds of data in reports.This integrated approach also allows for instant communication between the treating doctor and the nursing staff at home, resulting in better outcomes for the patient. Therefore, a well-engineered system that combines Telehealth and Mobile-health will create a big impact in delivering streamlined Critical Care at home.

Home Healthcare is also very effective for treatment of chronic diseases like Diabetes, Hypertension, Congestive Heart failure, COPD and Fractures to name a few. Use of Telehealth can significantly reduce admissions and re-admissions to the hospital and at the same time at a much lower cost. For E.g. Monitoring weight of a patient with a condition of Congestive Health Failure can alert clinicians to eminent worsening of condition so that appropriate and effective action can be taken in time. Usage of technologies in an integrated manner allows for evidence based medical care that helps in aligning staff, standardization of core processes around clinical best practices and therefore, implementation of focused training for clinicians around those processes.

Technology will play a pivotal role in the implementation and growth of Critical Care at home. There are already technologies available that provide monitors that are internet enabled and when combined with mobile and telemedicine can provide an effective framework for Critical Care at home.

Social media is also playing an important role in Home Healthcare. According to Pew Research, 46% of seniors who go online also use social media. This has spurred growth of some private social networks such as efamily and Family Crossings that allow social interaction and information sharing over the internet.

With patients getting more involved and taking charge of their healthcare needs, the market for Critical Care at home is poised for rapid growth. This will positively allow care to be delivered at home, with grace and dignity, apart from the economic benefit and ripple effect on the family and caregivers.

Author is Founder of CCU

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How technology can play a role in home healthcare services - The Sunday Guardian

A paper set to be delivered at next weeks Siggraph2017 conference has garnered a lot of pre-confab attention because the technology could possibly be used to produce fake news videos. But the technology described in the paper, Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync From Audio, could have many more beneficial uses, especially in the entertainment and gaming industries.

Researchers from the University of Washington have developed the technology to photorealistically put different words into former President Barack Obamas mouth, based on several hours of video footage from his weekly addresses. They used a recurrent neural network to study how Obamas mouth moves, then they manipulated his mouth and head motions as to sync them to rearranged words and sentences, creating new sentences.

Its easy to see how this could potentially be used for nefarious purposes, but the technology is a long way away from becoming widely available and it would be fairly easy to detect in fake videos, according to Supasorn Suwajanakorn, the lead author of the study. It would be relatively easy to develop a software to detect fake video, he says. Producing a truly realistic, hard-to-verify video may take much longer than that due to technical limitations.

Siggraphs conference chair Jerome Solomon, dean of Cogswell Polytechnical College, notes that any new technology can be used for good or bad. This is new technology in computer graphics, he explains. Were making things that might not be believable believable and worlds that dont exist exist. And I think people potentially using any technology out of our industry could use it for bad purposes or good.

Plus, Solomon says echoing Suwajanakorn, I think its a ways away from being available to everybody. Our conference is really a place where new technology comes in through our technical papers program, but it takes awhile for the technology to appear in the tools. Developers have to go and create the software to actually take this research and get it into the tools.

And there are a wide variety of uses for this particular technology.

Automatically editing video to allow accurate lip-sync to a new audio track is a novel advance on a very hot topic with many practical applications, says Marie-Paule Cani, Siggraphs technical paper chair. It could be used, for instance, to seamlessly dub a movie in a foreign language, or to correct what people said in video footage and no cost.

A number of papers and exhibits of new technology will be on display at Siggraph 2017, to be held July 30 through Aug. 3 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Among the many new technologies will be a presentation by brain-computer interface company Neurable. They make a cap that you put on your head and it reads your brainwaves so you can use it instead of a mouse or a keyboard to do different things, says Solomon. Theyre coming to Siggraph with that technology to show how you can use it to play a game. Imagine playing a game without have a controller in your hand.

A new addition to Siggraph this year is a VR theater with ongoing programming. Were going to show VR films, Solomon explains. Well have high-end VR headsets and can actually demonstrate VR storytelling. With the sound and the high-end digital, its a really different experience.

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Technology That Turns Obama's Words Into Lip-Synced Videos to Be Featured at Siggraph - Variety

What happened

Shares of Align Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALGN), an orthodontic-device company, rose about 10% during Friday's session. Record results released after the bell on Thursday should keep investors smiling all through the weekend.

Just as the analysts who pick stocks for our premium services predicted long ago, Align Technology's Invisalign tooth-straightening system is becoming increasingly popular. In the second quarter, the company shipped a record-breaking 231,900 cases, 31% more than it shipped during the same period last year.

Image source: Getty Images.

The number of cases of the translucent braces shipped wasn't the only figure that rose during the three months ended June. Second-quarter revenue jumped 32.3% year on year to $356.5 million, which was 14.9% more than the company raked in during the first quarter of the year. All channels performed well, but investors were pleased to hear growth in the important teen segment was especially strong.

Align Technology's braces might be barely visible, but the company's success is getting noticed. Following today's spike, the stock is up 103.1% over the past year. At its new high price, the shares trade at about 53 times this year's earnings expectations.

Although the stock might be trading at a sky-high multiple, there's probably more than enough demand to keep sales rising by double digits each quarter for years to come. Around the world, about 2.6 million patients with mild to moderate malocclusion have their teeth realigned by some means. These are the people best suited to treatment with the Invisalign system, but the potential market could be much larger.

The Invisalign system isn't anything like the metal-mouth image that usually comes to mind when people hear the word "braces." There could be a billion adults who want straighter teeth but don't want to broadcast it to their peers; Align's system is extremely discreet. I wouldn't be surprised if sales continue bursting for years to come.

Cory Renauer has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Align Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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Here's Why Align Technology Marched Higher Again Today - Motley Fool

In April, scientists achieved a major breakthrough that could one day drastically improve the fate of babies born extremely prematurely. Eight premature baby lambs spent their last month of development in an external womb that resembled a high-tech ziplock bag. At the time, the oldest lamb was nearly a year old, and still seemed to be developing normally.

This technology, if it works in humans, could one day prove lifesaving for the 30,000 or so babies each year that are born earlier than 26 weeks into pregnancy.

It could also complicateand even jeopardizethe right to an abortion in an America in which that right is predicated on whether a fetus is viable.

The Supreme Court has pegged the constitutional treatment of abortion to the viability of a fetus, I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School bioethicist, told Gizmodo. This has the potential to really disrupt things, first by asking the question of whether a fetus could be considered viable at the time of abortion if you could place it in an artificial womb.

Cohen raised this issue in a report for the Hastings Center published on Friday.

A normal human pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. In Roe v. Wade, the case that ultimately legalized abortion in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that whether a fetus was capable of surviving outside the womb was an important test of whether an abortion was legal. The Court said that viability typically began at some point during the third trimester, which begins at 24 weeks, but could really only be determined on a case by case basis. In 1992, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey reaffirmed that viability is key in defining a states power to regulate abortion. The number of weeks at which you can legally procure an abortion varies between 22 and 24 weeks by state. (If a womans health is at risk, the state cannot enforce an abortion ban at any stage of development.)

The human version of the external lamb womb that researchers eventually envision creating would be designed for premature babies born as early as 23 weeks. Researchers hope to test it on premature human babies within five years. (Lambs have a shorter gestation period; the 105- to 115-day-old premature lamb fetuses were the equivalent of about 23 weeks in a human.)

In the future, Cohen said, it stands to reason that this technology could save the lives of fetuses born even earlier. Imagine then, that you had made the decision to terminate a pregnancy at 18 weeks, but that such a technology technically made it viable for the fetus to be born at that point in development, then finish developing outside the womb. Would an abortion still be legal?

It could wind up being that you only have the right to an abortion up until you can put [a fetus]in the artificial womb, said Cohen. Its terrifying.

The advent of such artificial womb technology highlights how fragileand datedmuch of the law surrounding the right to an abortion really is.

In a 1983 decision, Justice Sandra Day OConnor argued that Roevs. Wade was on a collision course with itself, because improvements in technology would make it possible for a fetus to continually be viable earlier in the course of a pregnancy. In some cases, today, a fetus can now survive outside the womb at 22 weeks, two whole weeks earlier than at the time of Roe vs. Wade.

In 1990 a woman maybe could have an abortion at 25 weeks, but in 2020 perhaps it will be 20 weeks, said Cohen. Theres a problem when an abortion that would be legal in one decade is not in another under the Constitution.

Developing technology also tests the rhetoric surrounding the right to choose. A womans right to control her own body is a common legal and ethical argument made in favor of abortion. Under that logic, though, the law could simply compel a woman to put her fetus into an external womb, giving her back control of her own body but still forcing her into parenthood.

The way the law has thus far defined it, Cohen said, is that a woman has a right to stop carrying a child. It doesnt consider whether she also has a right to control what happens to the child if she is no longer responsible for carrying it. It could come down to an interpretation of what qualifies as control.

If you think the reason we have abortion rights is that women have a right to control their own bodies, this is saying you can control your own body, just give the fetus to someone else and theyll put it in an artificial womb, he said.

How invasive the procedure to remove a fetus, Cohen said, could influence how that all shakes out. If removing a fetus from the womb still required surgery, for example, a woman might be able to legally refuse surgery instead.

All of this may seem too hypothetical to be worth consideringafter all, theres no telling whether the technology that worked in lambs will translate to human babies. And the number of women who have abortions that late into their pregnancy is small. Somewhere around 9,090 women in the US had abortions after their 21st week of pregnancy in 2012, accounting for just 1.3 percent of all abortions. (Many of that subset seek abortions for health reasons. And again, new technologies would be unlikely to impact late-stage abortions deemed necessary for the health of a mother.)

But Sandra Day OConnor was rightalready, states have been emboldened by improving neonatal care in making laws that restrict abortion earlier and earlier in a womans pregnancy. Physicians, legal experts and bioethicists have long taken issue with viability as a standard for legality. (There is a lot of inconclusive debate about what might make a better standard.)

There have always been problems with this standard, Cohen said. But now theres good reason to believe it could get even worse.

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How New Technology Could Threaten a Woman's Right to Abortion - Gizmodo

Mashable

This creepy technology can read your emotions as you walk down the street Mashable If this Russian tech company has its way, emotion-reading recognition is the cool kid on the block right now. With serious consequences for everyone's privacy and personal data. NTechLab ignited a controversy last year after it released FindFace, an ...

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This creepy technology can read your emotions as you walk down the street - Mashable

Seven advanced transportation technology projects have secured a share of $600,000 in grants that intend to help developers and researchers commercialize their product.

The grant is funded in part by Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization's advanced transportation innovation hub at the University of Michigan and the Michigan Economic Development Corp.'s Entrepreneur and Innovation initiative.

Five projects will get a $100,000 grant and two others will receive $50,000 each with the chance to receive additional funding, which are being led by faculty at UM and Michigan State University.

The following projects received funding, according to the news release:

"These teams have made the connection between their research and future transportation systems, and are working hard to get their technology to market," UM MTRAC Program Director Eric Petersen said in a statement. "Investing in projects and people will help the state retain leadership in the transportation industry as vehicles become electrified and as autonomous systems are proposed for moving people and goods."

The advanced technologies innovation hub, which is jointly run by the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Office of Technology Transfer, is one of five hubs situated at a university. Michigan State University, Michigan Technical University and Wayne State University also run MTRAC programs that focus on the agriculture biology, advanced applied materials, life sciences, advanced transportation and biomedical industries, the news release said.

MTRAC is a statewide initiative that funds translational research to take new technologies from higher education, hospital and nonprofit research institutions to market, the release said.

"Having this many projects qualify for funding is an incredible sign that the program is working and an excellent representation of the type of intellectual talent we have in our universities across the state," MEDC University Relations Director Denise Graves said in a statement. "Being able to move transportation technologies from research to market is essential in growing Michigan's economy. Combining our state's brainpower with resources like MTRAC is a great example of providing commercial focus to research projects that can be translated into real world products."

Graves said an eight-person oversight committee, made up of industry and venture capital executives, makes the advanced technologies program successful. They are responsible for reviewing proposals, selecting finalists and scoring the proposals at a presentation or funding. The seven projects will receive funding Aug. 1, which will be available to them until July 31, 2018. The advanced transportation innovation hub will begin accepting new proposals in January.

For more information about the advanced transportation program, visit cfe.umich.edu/mtrac-transportation.

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Advanced transportation technology projects receive $600000 in grants - Crain's Detroit Business

Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler, speaks on July 25 about the states initiatives at a panel of industry and government officials in Washington on Next Generation 5G Wireless Networks. (Photo by Nathan J. Fish/Cronkite News)

Arizona lawmakers have been at the forefront when it comes to laying the groundwork for 5G, the next generation of wireless telecommunications technology, a group of experts said Tuesday.

The panel of industry and government officials said Arizona could become one of the first states with 5G technology, and they credited measures like the states HB 2365, which streamlines the permitting process for the faster networks.

Fifth-generation, or 5G, technology runs faster and allows people to be smarter about the applications and services that theyre running, said one speaker at the event hosted theFree State Foundation,a free-market think tank. A Federal Communications Commissioner at the event said 5G has the potential to be the first truly terrestrial, high-speed, high-capacity, fully-seamless, wireless internet experience.

Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler, said the technology is going to have a tremendous effect on the economy and everything people do in the future.

If we dont allow, in a rapid way, companies able to expand these services were going to be way behind the eight-ball.

HB 2365,passed in April, creates a streamlined process for telecommunications companies to deploy small cell-technology across the state, according to apress releasefrom the Arizona House Republicans.

Robert Fisher, senior vice president for the federal government affairs of Verizon, said Arizona is ahead of the curve.

Arizona is putting itself in the forefront of being able to have an environment that encourages 5G investment, and by passing that legislation not only will the citizens benefit and the cities benefit, but the community and economy from all the investment that will go into building a 5G network, Fisher said.

Jonathan Adelstein, president and CEO of the Wireless Infrastructure Association, also heaped praise on Arizona.

The government doing what they did in Arizona to make it easier to get to Phoenix, will make it easier to get to Yuma. he said.

Weninger said that the key to success for passing this legislation was setting a series of standards that the cities and counties agreed to.

I think the outcome is going to be better wireless service and possibly be one of the first handful of states to have 5G fully deployed, he said.

Fisher said Arizona has proven to be a model for other states.

That model is to bring together all stakeholders, both local and all the carriers together to try to figure out what the best policy is so that we can get streamline access to rights-of-way and deploy infrastructure in a quick manner, Fisher said.

With the increasing need for faster, more reliable data, the use of wireless devices has proliferated faster than most experts have imagined, FCC Commissioner Michael ORielly said.

While there is no firm definition, everyone agrees the next generation network will provide greater capacity, faster speeds and lower latency, ORielly said.

Consumers are increasing their cellphone data consumption massively, Adelstein said. As a matter of fact, at the same time thats happening, carriers are offering unlimited data plans. So, this is great news for consumers and theyve been getting more for less for a long time out of the wireless industry.

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Experts say Arizona legislation a model for implementing 5G technology - Arizona Capitol Times

New technology will be rolled out at Australian airports that will eventually see the end of "known passengers" producing their passports when arriving in the country.

Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton said on Wednesday the new AU$22.5 million, three-year contract will initially see 105 new smartgates rolled out that will enable passengers to be processed using facial recognition.

It is estimated 40 million people cleared Australia's borders last year, with the figure tipped to reach 50 million in three years, the minister said in a statement.

"The idea of this will be through new technology that is using facial recognition that in some cases if you've got a passport that can be read you won't even have to present the passport," Dutton told the Seven Network. "It will make it much quicker going through the immigration process."

Vision-Box Australia will be charged with rolling out the technology.

Vision-Box, headquartered in Portugal, recently implemented a facial recognition pilot program at New York's JFK Airport, an initiative led by Delta and US Customs and Border Protection.

Speaking at the ASIAL Security Conference in Sydney on Wednesday, Neil Campbell, director of Security Practice at Telstra, explained that Telstra is deploying its own facial recognition technology at its two new Security Operations Centres (SOCs) which will be opened next month in both Melbourne and Sydney.

Campbell explained the telco has built its SOCs to the ASIO-T4 standard -- a standard from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that is used by government departments, agencies, business enterprises, and critical infrastructure owners.

"To get into the level four area you need biometric authentication, so that's where we've deployed that -- which is an appropriate use because it's required to meet the requirements of a standard, to meet the law," he said.

"So as you try to sneak into our SOC, you'll need to badge in, you'll need to be retina scanned, facial recognition, and then you get access to the SOC. And if you didn't go through all of that and try to get into any system in the SOC, you get rejected and an alarm is created."

Campbell also pointed to a border security project that a partner of Telstra's, Corvus, is involved in with the United States government.

"Interesting in that for border security we can do things like, a combination of facial recognition, gate recognition, and also retina scanning up to about 10 metres -- and that's actually pretty cool, albeit invasive -- I like the thought of standing back from a machine and having it do its magic without feeling like I'm about to get a needle in my eye," he said.

"For an ex-cop I'm pretty anti-biometrics. I think they have their place, but you need to know why -- why am I deploying biometrics? Is it because it's cool? Is it because it's possible? Or is it because it's necessary?"

Earlier this month, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection published a request for tender for the provision of automated processing at Australian ports, which follows the airport initiative in requesting an Automated Border Control solution that would eliminate the need for physical tickets and have the ability to process travellers using contactless technology.

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection was given a total of AU$95.4 million in funding under the federal government's 2017-18 Budget, with AU$59.9 million over four years to be spent on enhancing biometric storage and processing capabilities.

With AAP

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Facial recognition technology to replace passports at Australian airports - ZDNet

Technology can be central to the lives of the 285 million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired, as long as they know how to use it. Thats where Erin Lauridsen, access technology director at LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, comes in.

In her role, Lauridsen helps ensure people who are blind and visually impaired know how to access all of the technology that they need to live their lives, Lauridsen told me on the latest episode of Bullish.That can be anything from computer literacy and smartphone use to being able to use assistive technologies like screen readers and magnification.

She also works with tech companies like Google, Uber, Lyft and Facebook around user testing to make sure things that already exist and that are being created are as accessible as they can be to people who are blind and visually impaired,Lauridsen said.

Among those who are legally blind in the U..S, there is a 70 percent unemployment rate, though. That stat has not been updated since the nineties, but Lauridsen said that its still high. Its not clear how many people are blind or visually impaired in the tech industry (tech companies dont typically report this data and it also brings up privacy concerns), but they seem to be few and far between.

One of the barriers to jobs for blind people is literacy, Lauriden said. Without access to brail and other accessible materials, the literacy gap can happen very early on in someones life.

Once [blind] people have that education and move into the work world, a lot of it is awareness, Lauridsen said. If youre the first person with a disability a hiring manager has ever met and they spend the interview wondering how on earth you got here today and how you tie your shoes, theyre probably not going to be focusing on your skills, so part of it is an awareness problem.

The other part, Lauridsen said, is the accessibility of developer tools. Lauridsen has several blind friends who are amazing coders, she said, but there are certain jobs and roles they cant take because the developer environments are not accessible to them.

Ultimately, Lauridsen hopes that tech companies will make accessibility more than this little compliance check box at the end of the process, Lauridsen said. She wants accessibility to be integrated as a really key and useful part of development cycles of building things and making things because people with disabilities are hackers and innovators, and thats what we do.

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Bullish: Increasing access to technology for blind people - TechCrunch

We went a bit overboard testing the best cheap coffee maker. We brought in seven of the most popular and best-reviewed sub-$100 coffee machines and compared them with what our blind-tasting panel of coffee nerds liked: the $200 Oxo On 9-cup coffee maker.

We started by tasting a single-origin coffee to determine which cheap machine was most acceptable to discerning coffee drinkers, then ran the panel a second time with preground Dunkin Donuts house blend from the corner store. The Hamilton Beach 12-Cup Coffee Maker (46201) swept both rounds of testing. It placed second to the Oxo in Round 1 and actually beat the Oxo during the Dunkin round.

I havent seen a Wirecutter or Sweethome evaluation of coffee machines that use pods. Is there a reason for that?

The truth is, K-Cup brewers are mostly the same. None of them make good coffee and the plastic pods arent easily recyclable. Something like our pick for cheap coffee maker will produce much better coffee and be way less expensive in the long run. Besides, its not hard to run a regular coffee maker.

Now making espresso at home takes a lot of practice to get right. We wouldnt fault anyone for getting a Nespresso machine. It can match a drive-through barista for about $1 a pod. Thats still a lot more expensive than grinding your own coffee, but it beats paying $3 for a similar drink at Starbucks. And unlike Keurig, Nespresso has been running a free pod recycling program for years.

Do coffee drinkers have anything to gain from the smart kitchen trend?

Not really. Adding Wi-Fi and an app just moves the buttons off the machine and onto your phone screen. Most coffee makers can already be programmed on a timer. You just need to remember to add preground coffee the night before, which a smart machine still cant do for you. In any case, the biggest problem when it comes to programmable coffee makers is that the coffee you put in the night before gets stale by the time its brewed. An app cant fix that.

You drank more than 100 cups of coffee to test pour-over coffee gear, 300 cups of coffee for cold-brew equipment. Did anyone get to sleep?

Slurp and spit, just like wine tasting. Though just like wine tasting, we did end up drinking a fair amount. Its hard not to when it tastes this good.

Follow Damon Darlin on Twitter @darlin.

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The Technology Behind Good Coffee - New York Times