A consulting firm dealing with long-range, leading edge technological innovations and their consequences and implications for healthcare policy and practice.
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alt="http://hfdigest.com/wp-content/gallery/pics/robomed2.jpg" The latest in bionic arms, connected in a roundabout way to the brain, is providing an unprecedented degree of freedom to its wearer. It has been discovered that the neural chip implants that interface such prosthetics with the brain eventually cause the brain itself to accept the prosthetic as an integral part of the body. […]
Acceleration in the number of news stories about stem cell therapies and related issues warrants a section to itself this month. The looming elderly boom will overwhelm society’s ability to care for them as they deteriorate. Either we let them rot, or we delegate the task to robots, or we find ways to halt, retard, […]
There is no common robotics theme in this issue, but that’s not for want of advances: The nanotechnologists’ dream of a Universal Assembler that can turn itself into any desired object — a patient, for example — is off to a “big” start, with components measuring hundredths rather than billionths of a meter. The line […]
If physician house calls make sense — and they do on both cost and quality grounds — how much more sense does it make to bring the house to the doctor, via telemedical home-monitoring equipment? The telemedical physician’s armamentarium of remote EKGs, digital blood pressure cuffs, etc., may soon be bolstered by Doppler-radar-driven vital-sign detectors […]
We reported last month on nano-engineered “zinc fingers”, amino acid protuberances that emanate from a single zinc ion that automatically bind to miscoded strands of DNA, stimulating the body’s innate repair mechanism to recode the gene correctly, thereby fixing whatever problem the bad gene was causing, without harmful side effects. If you think about it, […]
Fujitsu has added to the growing selection of “digital paper” for notepads, wallpapers, and billboards. At an eight of an inch thick, Motorola’s NED (nano-emissive display) screens would hardly qualify as digital paper, but if TV manufacturers adopt it, children born today may only hear of LCD and plasma screens in their history lessons. They […]
It’s been your average couple of months in computing and communications since our last issue, with an orders-of-magnitude improvement in amplifiers and silicon chips, key advances toward optical silicon chips, molecular transistors, and nanoscale mechanical memory, and Japan’s announced intention to built a 10 petaflop supercomputer by 2010. Next Generation Wireless Source article MIT researchers […]
With New Orleans seemingly in its death throes, Kashmir in seismic shambles, central America buried in mud, a global flu pandemic on the way, Iraq disintegrating, Bali bombed again, not to mention more decent Americans joining the millions reduced to living in poverty and lacking access to care, it’s hard not to get despondent. Most […]
Japanese researchers appear to have cured a diabetic patient by transplanting pancreatic cells from a living donor. (Cells from cadaver organs have previously been successfully used.) A less traumatic approach may be to re-engineer neurons taken from aborted fetuses and turn them into insulin-producing islet cells. Injected into normal mice, such cells produced insulin in […]
A new robot to support daily living introduced by Hitachi is evidence of Japan’s vision of the need and market for robots, and of its skill in developing them. However, the country’s strategic robotics initiative could be another “Fifth Generation Project”* in the making, and the West may soon catch up or overtake it. At […]
