Category: Health

Researchers have discovered that monkeys can control an extra robot arm along with their own arms. Brains are apparently so flexible that they can connect additional 'devices'. That offers plenty of opportunities for the future to let the world around us be controlled by robots that do as we think. Below is a summary of the complete text:

The Sencil of the Alfred E. Man Institute for Biomedical Engineering is a hair-thin biosensor. Its extremely sensitive tip is fastened in a blood vessel with a flexible fiberglass thread and sticks out of the skin like a normal hair. By attaching measuring devices you can, for example, measure the glucose concentration (video demonstration).

Google has invested in several DNA-research centres. These centres offer paid services in which they analyse your DNA and present it to you in online reports. The test results of your show if you have a genetic chance of medical conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer or rheumatoid arthritis.

The Dutch health care provider Meavita Nederland offers Care from a Distance, clients receive care via images and sound, supported by measured data such as blood sugar levels. With Care from a Distance a consultation with a doctor or other medical professional can take place at a distance via television or a broadband connection. Care providers can monitor clients at a distance and support them via home electronics and telemedicine (ITC care services). The client provides the care provider with data such as blood pressure, ecg and weight.

The WII Balance Board is a sort scale that can accurately determine where you put pressure on it. Apart from all kinds of fitness exercises, the Board also makes it possible to train your balance (fc).

Promoting balance in mind and body is not a short contemporary hype, not a trend like ‘we are going to play games again’, but a very long term trend. This trend however is only beginning, and will only further develop after the world economy has come to balance, we can hardly speak of low wage countries, and the automizing and robotizing trends have allowed us to work less. We then will finally have the time to structurally work on ourselves. We will then be able to do things we now consider ‘inexplicable’, as ’magic‘, or supra natural. It will take some time, I am talking about 2050, but the first products to help us in this are now introduced. And these are just brands again.

Through HealthVault consumers can maintain their medical records online, and get access to medical knowledge and health suppliers. Patients, people who are ill, can connect drivers like diabetes and pulse meters, and thus get better advise. HealthVault, an initiative of Microsoft, is very careful when it comes to privacy. The electronic health records that patients and their families can share with doctors is completely secured and decoded (em, Dutch). Thus personal health brands come to life. Now as an initiative of a software company. In the future personal health brands will especially employ people who ‘breathe health’. This is a small step in that direction.