Devices To Keep you Healthy

An armband device that can be worn all day - during workouts, at the office and at home - will calculate all calories you burn. You can connect it to a computer to tabulate your calorie intake versus what you're burning off. The Exerspy interactive system will pump up your workouts, and could make you healthy - but only if you make healthy choices by yourself.
Another gadget from Philips, DirectLife, will track calories you burn and display your daily progress by green lights - each one makes you 15% closer to your daily 100% activity target. Your overall progress can be monitored on your PC, daily or hourly - after you upload data from Activity Monitor to your PC. Exercise could be fun. Ubisoft's Just Dance game for Wii teaches you dance moves, lets you to compete with up to four players and have a dance party. It monitors your arm movements increasing your heart rate. The miCoach not only measures your hou eart rate, but gives you real time audio coaching and asks to speed up when you start slacking off. Using a small foot pod you tie into your sneaker, it tracks your speed and distance too, letting to manage the numbers on the Adidas website. You could also keep track of your mileage with the a solar powered odometere, if you like. Another device - Sensewear, an arm band from Bodymedia, enables automated monitoring of calories burned, dietary intake, duration of physical activity and sleep. A USB port allows the patient to periodically upload data from the armband to a website loaded with charts, graphs, and other data that allows both patient and physician to make informed decisions. Device by Toumaz, called Sensium, provides ultra low power monitoring of ECG, temperature, blood glucose and oxygen levels. It can also interface to 3 axis accelerometers, pressure sensors and includes a temperature sensor on chip. Sensium Life Pebble streams the data using a wireless datalink over a short range ( ~5m) to a Sensium USB adapter or data logger. Mio Watch (left) measures your heart rate, while other "smart" watches such as Garmin can wirelessly communicate with your scales and body composition monitor. Withing Wifi Scale will even automatically update your weight on Twitter, sending your stats to your computer and your iPhone. A personal calorie management device called Bodybugg measures calorie expenditure. Another pocket-sized piece of technology - Fitbit (also called a pedometer on steroids) - promises to tell you the number of calories burned, steps taken, miles walked, and quality of sleep in addition to the intensity of exercise you’ve had all day.
It also records and stores detailed daily data for a week and summarized daily data for a month. Using the same 3D motion sensing technology as the Nintendo Wii, the creators of the Fitbit hope to turn everyday activities into a fitness game. The gadget uploads your activity stats, including calories burned, wirelessly to the web. You can wear it in your pocket, clipped to your pants, bra or your wrist.

Can it be any easier? Sure, it can. PhiloMetron is creating a bandage-sized smart patch that will also do the usual counting of calories. Besides, at the end of the day it could tell you what to do to make the next day even more successful. It also suggests taking a quick walk when it’s needed, to help things on their way. The patch sends all information collected during the day to your cell phone, by a Bluetooth connection.
Of course, not everyone can make the best food choices. It’d be far easier for most people if you ha d a diet itian to follow you around and tell you what to do. It's such a hassle to have to manually en ter every food... One of possibl e solution is is to use FoodScanner, a new app that scans package bar codes for quick and easy calorie logging.

Device by Toumaz, called Sensium, provides ultra low power monitoring of ECG, temperature, blood glucose and oxygen levels. It can also interface to 3 axis accelerometers, pressure sensors and includes a temperature sensor on chip. Sensium Life Pebble streams the data using a wireless datalink over a short range ( ~5m) to a Sensium USB adapter or data logger. Cardionet system monitors every heartbeat during normal daily activities, for up to 21 days, and detects, records, and transmits event data automatically to the prescribing physician via wireless phone. In a not so far away future, many other bodily functions and environmental influences will be monitored 24x7 - examples are the daily fluctuations in hormone levels and medications taken - Proteus ingestible event markers (IEMs, shown on the right) could send ultra-low-power digital signals through the body to a microelectronic receiver that may look like a small bandage style skin patch. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information such as the type of drug, the dose, and the place of manufacturing.

Of course, it's not just food, medications and calories. There is more to health than measurements of outcomes. Device shown on the right uses ultrasonic sensors to detect how close you are to the screen and remind you to sit up straight - by showing flashing LED lights or chime once when you’re leaning too close to your monitor. To keep it running just plug it into your USB port. You can purchase it for $21.99 from Sourcing Map. (See also PC Gadgets, USB Gadgets, iPosture, UberGizmo; USB Posture Alert Reminder).
You can wear another gudget (shown on the top left) around your neck, and when you start to slouch, it’ll correct you with an audible alarm. Designed in Japan, it sells for $8.43 by DealExtreme.

But what about viruses, bacteria, fungi infections and nasty little mosquitos? Some startups are working on that too. We will only mention the simplest device already on the market - a $5 USB Ultrasonic Mosquito Pest Repeller.
This little device could eliminate the use of pesticides and other harmful bug sprays, although it is still unclear if it actually works.
And what about accidents? What if you can't keep you hands off your cell phone while driving? Driving while distracted (DWD) due to texting would make accidents 23 times more likely, while talking on a cell phone while driving, even hands-free, makes drivers as likely to cause a crash as someone considered legally drunk. A new blocking device can help you to avoid accidents. CellControl plugs into the car computer terminals, links to cell phones via Bluetooth and a downloadable application. When the vehicle is in motion (more than 1mph), the device blocks all incoming and outgoing calls, plus texts and e-mails. You can still call emergency numbers though. Passenger cell phones are not affected.

Aurametrix is developing decision support systems and noninvasive personal monitoring devices to help you evaluate health risks, decide on preventative measures, estimate cost/benefits of performing diagnostic tests. Better tools for a healthier world.

Metabonomic Profiling as a Non-invasive Inexpensive Diagnostics Tool

Small molecules in our breath, saliva, sweat and other body fluids can tell a lot about our health and disease, state of mind, therapeutic outcomes, athletic and mental performance, tapping into both genetic and environmental factors influencing our lives.

Urinary metabonomic profiling, for example, predicts metabolism of drugs and xenobiotics, as was recently shown by Imperial College London and Pfizer teams. Relative concentrations of small molecules such as p-cresol sulfate could be used for prediction of drug treatment outcomes. Qulitative measurements of lipids, metabolites, proteins and complexes predict sensitivity to biologics such as anti-HER2 therapy. (see full article in pdf)

Many existing and emerging diagnostics tools used as the gold standard for diagnosis of cancers are expensive and invasive. Metabolic profiling would solve the cost issue and would not require penetration, catheterization, incision nor breaking the skin and into body cavities. Recent study demonstrates potential of metabonomics in diagnostics of bladder cancers. This is not surprising, as well-trained dogs can fairly accurately identify patients with bladder cancer based on urine odor.They do well identifying lung and breast cancers, ovarian carcinomas, endometrial cancer, renal cell carcinoma, epileptic and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures and many other conditions too, all based on unique signatures of metabolites in human odors.

Metabolic profiling of plasma showed potential for diagnostics of Parkinson's disease through its early symptomatic phase. As seen in the figure, concentration of many molecules was significantly different, but pyruvate was the key metabolite. Sarcosine, an N-methyl derivative of the amino acid glycine, was identified as a differential metabolite during prostate cancer progression to metastasis.

Metabolite profiling was shown to be a promising diagnostic technique for coronary heart disease, diabetes mellitus, pediatric clinical studies, eclampsia, lipid disorder , skin cancer, colon carcinoma, metastatic prostate cancer, epithelial ovarian cancer , liver cancer, lung cancer, hypertension , kidney deficiency syndrome, infertility treatment, and motor neuron disease. Devices checking for metabolites in the air can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, healthy and sick trees and people. Besides traditional mass spec and GC analyzers, many nanotechnology-based device prototypes are being built, such as gold nanoparticle based, colorimetric arrays, or xerogel sensor with CMOS detector. New findings are announced every month.

Metabolic profiling distinguish people with 99% accuracy, even healthy monozygotic twins have different profiles, demonstrating yet again that metabolites are products of gene-environment interaction, bearing more information about us than just genes.

Aurametrix is conducting research to develop next-generation mobile devices to help you evaluate your personal health risks and benefits. Better tools for a healthier world.

What could make us eat healthy?

What could make us eat healthy? Better self-evaluation, self-awareness through personal health management tools, says Aurametrix.

Although the majority of Americans acknowledges importance of healthy diets, this does not always translate into behavior change. Taste, preferences acquired during childhood and adolescence, friends and family, and media have more influence on what we eat. In 1997, for example, food manufacturers spent 44.4% of their advertising budget on prepared convenience foods, confectionery and snacks, and bakery goods compared with only 2.2% on fruits, vegetables, grains and beans. Besides, busy people prefer prepackaged foods and restaurant meals, which are not the healthiest choices either.

Healthy eating index (HEI, developed by USDA) is a predictor of childhood diabetes, obesity, and mortality - it's associated with 4 of the 10 leading causes of death (coronary heart disease, certain types of cancer, stroke, and type 2 diabetes).

The quality of the American diet slightly improved since 1989 (the first year the Index was calculated), but flattened since 1996. In 1989 the average HEI score was 61.5, in 1996 and
1999-2000 it was 63.8, a 4-percent increase, but still in the “needs improvement” range. People seemed to be somewhat cutting down on fat, but were consuming even more salt. Excess salt consumption occurs throughout the world. Korean government even developed a salt sensor to help people eat healthier.

US studies of 1999-2000 showed that the two lowest mean scores were for the fruits (3.8) and milk (5.9) components of the HEI: Only 17% of the people consumed the recommended number of servings of fruit per day, and only 30% met the dietary recommendation for milk.

More recent studies on diet quality in Canada display even less optimistic results. Canadians are not eating enough servings of dark green and orange vegetables, as well as of whole fruits and whole-grain products.

Age-dependence show that people adjust their diets once they realize how much better they feel when eat healthy. What exactly is best for an individual may vary - some people can eat foods with high content of saturated fat and cholesterol diet, yet keep normal blood cholesterol.
Others may not realize what exactly they are eating that is not healthy for them.

Self-evaluation tools have been shown to be effective for developing healthy eating habits.
Aurametrix is working on tools to help you evaluate your personal health risks and benefits and make the right health choices.

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