The technology was built using data collected from a study of US Fitbit users launched in May 2020. The Fitbit Heart Study aimed to detect atrial fibrillation (AFib), also known as irregular heart rhythm.
AFib is common in the US, affecting around 12.1 million people, with advancing age, high blood pressure and obesity all common risk factors for the condition. One out of every four people will experience AFib at some point in their lifetime.
Currently, Fitbit can only periodically check for irregular heart rhythm; Fitbit users must decide to check it. Fitbit’s new feature, however, could run in the background and notify people if they’re exhibiting symptoms of atrial fibrillation. This would help Fitbit better compete with the Apple Watch’s EKG feature, which also checks heart rhythms and alerts users of irregularities.
Photo: Fitbit
Fitbit launched a study in 2020 to test its passive heart rhythm technology. Nearly half a million Fitbit users participated in the study, and it flagged around 1 percent of participants (just under 5,000 people) as having an irregular heart rhythm, according to data presented at the 2021 American Heart Association meeting. Those people were asked to set up a telehealth consultation so they could get an EKG patch, and around 1,000 did so. Of that group, a third had the diagnosis confirmed — giving the tech a positive predictive value for atrial fibrillation of 98 percent, reports The Verge.
“These results are extremely promising and we think will have a real impact on early detection and treatment of this important condition,” Tony Faranesh, a research scientist at Fitbit, said in a press briefing.
Post-FDA approval, Fitbit devices will come closer to the Apple Watch in terms of passive heart monitoring capabilities and give it the much-needed ability to send out a warning in the event of atrial fibrillation.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
For the first time, researchers demonstrate an artificial organic neuron, a nerve cell, that can be integrated with a living plant and an artificial organic synapse. Both the neuron and the synapse are made from printed organic electrochemical transistors.
On connecting to the carnivorous Venus flytrap, the electrical pulses from the artificial nerve cell can cause the plant’s leaves to close, although no fly has entered the trap. Organic semiconductors can conduct both electrons and ions, thus helping mimic the ion-based mechanism of pulse (action potential) generation in plants. In this case, the small electric pulse of less than 0.6 V can induce action potentials in the plant, which in turn causes the leaves to close.
“We chose the Venus flytrap so we could clearly show how we can steer the biological system with the artificial organic system and get them to communicate in the same language,” says Simone Fabiano, associate professor and principal investigator in organic nanoelectronics at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping.
In 2018 the research group at Linköping University became the first to develop complementary and printable organic electrochemical circuits — that is, with both n-type and p-type polymers, which conduct negative and positive charges. This made it possible to build printed complementary organic electrochemical transistors. The group has subsequently optimized the organic transistors, so that they can be manufactured in printing presses on thin plastic foil. Thousands of transistors can be printed on a single plastic substrate. Together with researchers in Lund and Gothenburg, the group has used the printed transistors to emulate the neurons and synapses of the biological system. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Linköping University Campus. Image: Toheeb Adigun (Wikimedia Commons)
“For the first time, we’re using the transistor’s ability to switch based on ion concentration to modulate the spiking frequency,” says Padinhare Cholakkal Harikesh, post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics. The spiking frequency gives the signal that causes the biological system to react.
“We’ve also shown that the connection between the neuron and the synapse has a learning behavior, called Hebbian learning. Information is stored in the synapse, which makes the signaling more and more effective,” says Simone Fabiano.
The hope is that artificial nerve cells can be used for sensitive human prostheses, implantable systems for relieving neurological diseases, and soft intelligent robotics.
“We’ve developed ion-based neurons, similar to our own, that can be connected to biological systems. Organic semiconductors have numerous advantages — they’re biocompatible, biodegradable, soft and formable. They only require low voltage to operate, which is completely harmless to both plants and vertebrates” explains Chi-Yuan Yang, post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
Garmin makes some of the best fitness wearables, and we can help you find the right one at the right price with this roundup of the best Garmin watch deals.
Electronic Caregiver (ECG), a digital health technology and services company, is debuting Addison the Virtual Caregiver at HIMSS22. The company describes Addison as a highly intelligent, engaging, and scalable platform to deliver value-based care. With seamless vitals monitoring, threshold alerts, care plan management, and electronic health record integrations, Addison provides clinical providers and public health stakeholders resources to proactively manage patient care, enhance treatment adherence, and improve outcomes.
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using a serverless architecture incorporating microservices, Addison is ECG’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) which powers all patient-facing and provider-facing applications. Addison incorporates 24 services from Amazon, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Lambda. Addison offers 10x reliability improvements and 100x scalability through automation, responsiveness, and flexibility to meet the surging demand for telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), and hospital-at-home models of care, according to a press release.
“We were customer-centric in our development of Addison and that wasn’t easy because we have multiple types of customers that are all looking for different features in a telehealth solution,” says ECG Chief Technology Officer Dr. David Keeley. “Being able to take feedback across all those strata in our customer ecosystem and design a solution with the flexibility and scalability to meet these diverse needs makes me really proud of what we’re delivering with Addison. It’s a solution for patients, family caregivers, health care organizations, physician practices, home health agencies, care management firms, and senior housing providers.”
ECG is now a technology solution provider within the AWS Partner Network (APN) working with public and private sector health care providers and payors across the globe.
“To have the world’s foremost authority on best practices in the industry review, approve, and validate what we are taking to market with our modernization of Addison is significant. This means that ECG has enhanced automation and improved privacy and security to provide features and functionality that our customers have been demanding. Addison is HIPAA, GDPR, and FHIR compliant,” Keeley notes.
Addison provides clinical providers and public health stakeholders resources to proactively manage patient care, enhance treatment adherence, and improve outcomes. (PRNewswire photo)
“I am proud that our Partner, Electronic Caregiver is transforming the model of care for patients, families, and caregivers by leveraging the capabilities and scalability of AWS technology services and cloud,” said Sandy Carter, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs, AWS. “Given the profound impact possible, we are eager to see more clinical providers and public health stakeholders use Addison to proactively manage patient care, enhance treatment, and improve health outcomes overall.”
ECG works with non-profit health providers, academic medical centers, universities, and federal, state, and local programs to deliver impactful health care solutions. Customers include MD Revolution, Methodist Health System, Memorial Medical Center, MountainView Regional Medical Center, Paracelsus Medical University (Austria), Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine, New Mexico State University, Zia Healthcare Services, and Medicaid-funded providers in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Iowa, and Michigan.
Partnering with a rural hospital system in Mississippi, a 47% decrease in hospital readmissions through use of ECG’s telehealth services was achieved. Collaborating with regional public health officials, hospital systems, and universities in New Mexico to address a surge in Covid cases, hospital bed capacity was expanded by 77% using RPM at 1/50th of the cost of inpatient care.
“Public health and private sector stakeholders came together to implement a COVID-to-Home program. Had this program not existed, many of those people would not have received any care,” said Dr. John Andazola, Program Director of the Southern New Mexico Family Medicine Residency Program at Memorial Medical Center. “They were at risk for terrible outcomes. Building a structure where we can successfully treat people at home using telehealth and remote patient monitoring so that inpatient capacity can be optimized for all health care needs is really what this program has demonstrated.”
Electronic Caregiver is a privately held, 11-year-old digital health technology and services company headquartered in Las Cruces, NM (USA). ECG’s mission is to design and deliver innovative, impactful telehealth products and services that bridge the chasm between the doctor’s office and patient’s home to improve outcomes, expand access, and optimize resource allocation. ECG has been qualified as a technology solution provider in the AWS Partner Network (APN). The company’s solutions are available through health care organizations, physician practices, care management firms, homecare agencies, and senior housing providers to deliver hospital-at-home, chronic care management, and remote patient monitoring programs.
Researchers from China’s Tsinghua University and East China Normal University have created a transistor with the smallest gate length ever reported. This milestone was made possible by using graphene and molybdenum disulfide and stacking them into a staircase-like structure with two steps.
Transistors have a few core components: the source, the drain, the channel, and the gate. Electrical current flows from the source, through the channel, past the gate, and into the drain. The gate switches this current on or off depending on the voltage applied to it.
On the higher step, there is the source, and on top of the lower step, there is the drain. Both are made of a titanium palladium alloy separated by the surface of the stairs, which is made of a single sheet of a molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), itself resting on a layer of hafnium dioxide that acts as an electrical insulator, reports GrapheneInfo.
The interior of the higher step is a sandwich of aluminum covered in aluminum oxide, which rests on top of a graphene sheet. The aluminum oxide acts as an electrical insulator, except for a small gap in the vertical wall of the higher step, where the graphene sheet is allowed to contact the molybdenum disulfide. The entire staircase structure rests on a thick layer of silicon dioxide.
Tsinghua University, China
The trick to this design is that the edge of the graphene sheet is used, which means that when the gate is set to the “on” state, it’s only 0.34 nm wide—essentially the width of the graphene layer itself. Another notable feature of this “side-wall transistor” is its negligible current leakage due to higher off-state resistance. Manufacturers could leverage this quality for low-power applications. Best of all, it would be relatively easy to make, although many of the prototypes required quite a bit of voltage to drive.
The research team believes going smaller than 0.34 nm for the gate size is almost impossible.
The researchers behind the new transistor managed to prove that a functional transistor could be made using one-atom thin materials without inventing a new process for precision positioning of the required layers. However, reliably building billions of these side-wall transistors is still a major challenge.
In the meantime, many companies are working on making gate-all-around (GAA-FET) transistors a reality and standardizing interconnects for chiplet designs.
Amrita University in Tamil Nadu, India, has developed a device for home-monitoring of glucose and blood pressure. Amrita Spandanam, as the device is called, will be sold online and through pharmacists across the country. The Tamil word ‘Spandanam’ means ‘beat’ in English.
Developed and patented by the varsity’s Centre for Wireless Networks and Applications, it is a wearable, six-in-one device that is an excellent replacement for a bedside monitor. It can be used to measure six body parameters including blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, and 6-lead ECG, according to a press release.
“Amrita Spandanam is a revolutionary device that has bagged several US patents, with results published in top scientific journals. It offers a quick, easy, affordable and non-invasive way to monitor and detect diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, sleep apnea and allergy attacks from the comfort of one’s home. The product was extensively tested on 1000 patients at Amrita Hospital in Kochi and various remote clinics in Kerala. Last year, these devices were successfully deployed at Amrita Hospital to remotely monitor the progression of severity in COVID-19 patients,” said Dr Maneesha V Ramesh, the Provost of Amrita University who led the team of researchers.
Amrita University Campus (PRNewswire photo)
Amrita Spandanam is connected to the patient’s smartphone. The data is sent to a secure hospital cloud which enables any doctor authorized by the patient to access the vital parameters remotely from any location. The product also integrates multiple -learning models that can predict the potential deterioration of patients’ health and provide early warning decision support to doctors for acute hypotensive episodes, sepsis, sleep apnea, and atrial fibrillation.
Amrita partners with academic, industry and governmental institutions across the world to accomplish human-centered, translational, and groundbreaking research. Some of Amrita’s partners include Harvard University, Columbia University, King’s College London, KTH – Royal Institute of Technology, VU Amsterdam, the British Geological Society, University of Oxford, Italian National Research Council, Deakin University, and the University of Tokyo. Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma), a world-renowned humanitarian leader is the founder, Chancellor, and guiding light of Amrita University.
MIT’s Rosalind Picard and Massachusetts General Hospital’s Paola Pedrelli are united by the belief that artificial intelligence may be able to help make mental health care more accessible to patients.
In her 15 years as a clinician and researcher in psychology, Pedrelli says “it’s been very, very clear that there are a number of barriers for patients with mental health disorders to accessing and receiving adequate care.” Those barriers may include figuring out when and where to seek help, finding a nearby provider who is taking patients, and obtaining financial resources and transportation to attend appointments.
Pedrelli is an assistant professor in psychology at the Harvard Medical School and the associate director of the Depression Clinical and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). For more than five years, she has been collaborating with Picard, an MIT professor of media arts and sciences and a principal investigator at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) on a project to develop machine-learning algorithms to help diagnose and monitor symptom changes among patients with major depressive disorder, reports MIT.
Machine learning is a type of AI technology where, when the machine is given lots of data and examples of good behavior (i.e., what output to produce when it sees a particular input), it can get quite good at autonomously performing a task. It can also help identify patterns that are meaningful, which humans may not have been able to find as quickly without the machine’s help. Using wearable devices and smartphones of study participants, Picard and Pedrelli can gather detailed data on participants’ skin conductance and temperature, heart rate, activity levels, socialization, personal assessment of depression, sleep patterns, and more. Their goal is to develop machine learning algorithms that can intake this tremendous amount of data, and make it meaningful — identifying when an individual may be struggling and what might be helpful to them. They hope that their algorithms will eventually equip physicians and patients with useful information about individual disease trajectory and effective treatment.
“We’re trying to build sophisticated models that have the ability to not only learn what’s common across people, but to learn categories of what’s changing in an individual’s life,” Picard says. “We want to provide those individuals who want it with the opportunity to have access to information that is evidence-based and personalized, and makes a difference for their health.”
Machine learning and mental health
Picard and Szymon Fedor, a research scientist in Picard’s affective computing lab, began collaborating with Pedrelli in 2016. After running a small pilot study, they are now in the fourth year of their National Institutes of Health-funded, five-year study.
To conduct the study, the researchers recruited MGH participants with major depression disorder who have recently changed their treatment. So far, 48 participants have enrolled in the study. For 22 hours per day, every day for 12 weeks, participants wear Empatica E4 wristbands. These wearable wristbands, designed by one of the companies Picard founded, can pick up information on biometric data, like electrodermal (skin) activity. Participants also download apps on their phone which collect data on texts and phone calls, location, and app usage, and also prompt them to complete a biweekly depression survey.
Every week, patients check in with a clinician who evaluates their depressive symptoms.
“We put all of that data we collected from the wearable and smartphone into our machine-learning algorithm, and we try to see how well the machine learning predicts the labels given by the doctors,” Picard says. “Right now, we are quite good at predicting those labels.”
Image credit: MIT
Empowering users
While developing effective machine-learning algorithms is one challenge researchers face, designing a tool that will empower and uplift its users is another. Picard says, “The question we’re really focusing on now is, once you have the machine-learning algorithms, how is that going to help people?”
Picard and her team are thinking critically about how the machine-learning algorithms may present their findings to users: through a new device, a smartphone app, or even a method of notifying a predetermined doctor or family member of how best to support the user.
For example, imagine a technology that records that a person has recently been sleeping less, staying inside their home more, and has a faster-than-usual heart rate. These changes may be so subtle that the individual and their loved ones have not yet noticed them. Machine-learning algorithms may be able to make sense of these data, mapping them onto the individual’s past experiences and the experiences of other users. The technology may then be able to encourage the individual to engage in certain behaviors that have improved their well-being in the past, or to reach out to their physician.
If implemented incorrectly, it’s possible that this type of technology could have adverse effects. If an app alerts someone that they’re headed toward a deep depression, that could be discouraging information that leads to further negative emotions. Pedrelli and Picard are involving real users in the design process to create a tool that’s helpful, not harmful.
“What could be effective is a tool that could tell an individual ‘The reason you’re feeling down might be the data related to your sleep has changed, and the data relate to your social activity, and you haven’t had any time with your friends, your physical activity has been cut down. The recommendation is that you find a way to increase those things,’” Picard says. The team is also prioritizing data privacy and informed consent.
Artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms can make connections and identify patterns in large datasets that humans aren’t as good at noticing, Picard says. “I think there’s a real compelling case to be made for technology helping people be smarter about people.”
Smartwatches offer notifications, fitness tracking, and more. Choosing one is the hard part, so to help, here is our list of the best smartwatches you can buy.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
Looking for your first fitness tracker or an upgrade to the one you're wearing? Here are our picks for the best fitness trackers that are available right now.
You might want to try the Razer Anzu smart glasses with Best Buy's $140 discount, which makes them affordable at $60, less than half the original price of $200.
Fitbit will issue you a refund of $299 after the receipt of Ionic smartwatch. It will also provide you a discount code for 40% off select Fitbit devices.
This month we have selected a brilliant safety wearable device for the utilities and energy distribution industry. Daily routines carried out in dangerous areas can lead to careless mistakes even after years. For this reason, PEEK has developed a wearable that automatically warns every employee working on the power grid if dangerous situations occur.
Their solution is a wearable device that operators use in close proximity to high-voltage lines. PEEK’s proprietary technology is able to analyse and identify data from the surrounding environment.
In case the user is too close to a high voltage equipment, PEEK will notify him with a warning signal. In doing so PEEK makes the invisible visible and ensures an extra layer of security avoiding fatal mistakes.
Thanks to a user-centric approach, PEEK manages to encapsulate high-performance sensor fusion (PEEK fusion array) and AI technologies (PEEK AI Stack) in a solid, compact, and easy-to-use wearable device. PEEK is already available in the US and Europe.
Casio has released the ultimate version of its popular square G-Shock watch, the MRG-B5000. We've been wearing this $4,000 model to see if it's worth the money.
Garmin makes some of the best fitness wearables, and we can help you find the right one at the right price with this roundup of the best Garmin watch deals.
Smartwatches make life easier by sending alerts right on your wrist. Many also provide fitness-tracking features, so now is a great time to pick one up for cheap. With so many models available, you can find a deal almost all of the time.
The Apple Watch has surged to prominence in recent years. If you're in the market for an iOS wearable, we've sniffed out the best Apple Watch deals available right now.
