Thalmic Labs, which makes the Myo gesture-sending armband, has raised another $120 million from Intel Capital, Amazon Alexa Fund and others. VentureBeat notes that this is the first fundraising round since 2013, which yielded $20 million. Intel Capital led that round, too. The Myo band is a particularly interesting product. It fits around your forearm and senses -- and … [Read more...]
Wearables Cause Gaps in HIPAA Security, Feds Say
A federal report (PDF) says that consumer wearables are putting their users' health privacy at risk, and that more federal oversight may be required. The National Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, within the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote that it's frequently unclear where the boundaries of confidential information lie. … [Read more...]
Wearables Skin Game: Less is More?
When it came to screens, for a long time it’s been the bigger, the better. Nothing like seeing Game of Thrones gore life-size, or being able to check out the tonsils of The Voice contestants. But while TVs, wall screens, and monitors were undergoing a growth spurt, there were people in labs trying to make view screens smaller, easier to carry around. And what could be easier to … [Read more...]
Teaching Future Service Dogs New Tricks
Service animals—almost always dogs—literally open doors for their disabled owners, as well as turning out the lights as they leave. Service dogs’ training varies with the kind of disability they will be helping with, and they can physically help their person with stairs and balance, bring medicine and water, provide assistance in emergencies and when the person is unresponsive, … [Read more...]
Fitbit Data Helps Save a Life
The Annals of Emergency Medicine isn't a journal we crack all the time around here, but it carries an article that describes how data collected by a patient's Fitbit Charge HR helped diagnose a life-threatening condition. The article's a bit technical, but the deal is that the patient showed up with cardiac arrhythmia. If the arrhythmia was chronic, one treatment was … [Read more...]
Empatica Embrace: Wearable That Can Save Lives
Seizures are frightening, sneaky, and can be life-threatening. While epileptic seizures are the most common—1 out of 26 people will develop the disease in their lifetimes—seizures also can result from Alzheimer’s, stroke, genetic factors, brain tumors and infections with high fevers. Just knowing a seizure is imminent can mean being able to avoid a medical emergency. The … [Read more...]
MIT Researchers Want to Open the World for Blind, Visually Impaired People
For people who are blind or visually impaired, reading is too often a matter of dependence on other people, either as readers or as translators into Braille. More than 3 million books are published annually in the U.S; only a small percentage of those are also published in Braille. Researchers at MIT are tackling the problem with the prototype FingerReader, which would allow … [Read more...]
In the Same Vein: New Recognition Technology from Samsung
Fingerprint and iris scanners might soon be old hat in the recognition game. Samsung’s recently published patent “Wearable Device and of Operating the Same” is for a wearable device that can identify a user by an image of her veins. The device takes a picture of your veins via a camera/infrared combination and compares it to a stored image. If they match, the device could be … [Read more...]
Wearable Coffee to Go
You know those jokes about taking your coffee by IV? Maybe they're not quite so far-fetched anymore. Joule is a bracelet with a time-release patch on its underside that releases a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine over four hours. It's important to note: this is an Indiegogo project, so not only isn't it available yet, it doesn't really exist in the way that most of us … [Read more...]
Myo Armband: Armed and Ready for Prosthetics
Thalmic Labs’s Myo Armband, which lets you control various devices by gesture, has been recognized from the beginning as a device with great potential. There are now apps to control electronic devices and services such as drones, Netflix, iTunes, keyboards, computer screens, and menus by hand and arm gestures. It’s not quite full Internet access by gesture and VR that Keanu … [Read more...]