Sleeping on the job might bring up images of napping at your desk, but in many industries it is a major health and safety hazard -- literally a case of life and death for the worker and for others. With the clear exception of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, sleeping on the job is not a funny or trivial problem. No one wants an airplane pilot or the driver of an 18-wheeler … [Read more...]
Hexoskin Raises Nearly $1 Million for Connected Fabrics to Chase FDA Approval
It's been a good year for the connected fabrics business: OMSignal shipped shirts with Ralph Lauren, Clothing+ got scooped up by Jabil (which developed a reference platform), and now Hexoskin has closed a funding round of just under $1 million so it can chase FDA approval for a new line of clothing. Hexoskin's parent company, Carre Technologies, says the upcoming line will … [Read more...]
Bandages Get a Hydrogel Upgrade
MIT's got an interest in wearable technology with the creation of a “smart Band-Aid,” a flexible, adhesive hydrogel that can carry health sensors and monitor a patient’s condition. With a reservoir in the gel, the dressing can also deliver medication and warn when the medication level getting low. Researchers think one of the first uses for the hydrogel -- which is 90 … [Read more...]
Verily, Is Google Out for Blood?
You can’t get blood from a stone, but Google is apparently planning to get it from a watch. On your arm. Without needles. Are we the only ones who think this could be the foundation for a really bad sci-fi movie about vampire robots? Google recently applied for a patent for this device, but details, like how it gets the blood without a needle, are scarce at this point. The … [Read more...]
Tattoos for Healthy Living
Tattoos, however cool, are not usually associated with health, but Austin-based tech development company Chaotic Moon Studios is looking to change that with TechTats. The biowearable has an elegant steampunk look, with all the circuitry operational. It can track the wearer’s biometric data via an Atiny85 microcontroller and electro conductive paint, and download the data to … [Read more...]
“Pay As You Live” Health Insurance?
Someone's got the bright dystopian idea of using fitness tracker data to individualize health insurance rates. The "Pay as You Live" concept is based on "Pay as You Drive" insurance programs such as Progressive’s Snapshot, where you snap a dongle in your car to track how you drive; safer behaviors supposedly result in lower car insurance rates. Some members of the British … [Read more...]
Top-Level Shakeup at Proteus Digital Health
Proteus Digital Health, the unicorn company that puts circuitry on pills to monitor drug compliance, has had a management shakeup, in what appears to be a push on the part of investors to drive revenues. A release on the company's site says that Molly O'Neill has been named Chief Commercial Office and Jonathan Symonds is the new chairman of the board. O'Neill had been the … [Read more...]
NFC Vaccine Tracking Wins UNICEF Wearables Award
We just wrote about one of the two UNICEF Wearables for Good challenge winners (well, we lifted it from our sister site Health Tech Insider). There was another winner -- one that weds RFID with a cultural totem to help health-care workers know whether a kid has been vaccinated. In rural places, access to the Internet is limited, as is access to reliable written medical … [Read more...]
SoaPen Wins UNICEF’s Wearables for Good Challenge
UNICEF’s Wearables for Good challenge -- hosted by UNICEF, Arm Holdings, and Frog -- found its two winners among 2,000 registrants and 250 design submissions. The key goal of the challenge was to identify the best products that can help fight infant mortality. One of the two winners is SoaPen, a wearable and portable soap designed to encourage children to wash their hands in … [Read more...]
Wearable Artificial Kidney Could Make Dialysis Machines Dinosaurs
Victor Gura, an associate clinical professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA, and his colleagues have developed and are testing the first wearable dialysis machine. Patients who need dialysis must currently go to clinics and hospitals, where they are hooked up to a machine and spend as much as four hours sitting while the machine removes waste and … [Read more...]