Category: Conference

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41710.wss

IBM is planning a a brain-inspired model for a new generation of highly-interconnected, asynchronous, parallel and large-scale computing systems based around the concept of cognitive computing.  It is an ecosystem designed for programming neurosynaptic chips that have an architecture inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain

Cognitive computing systems can be trained with artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms.  IBM Research says this sort of technology allows for the creation of “applications that mimic the brain’s abilities for perception, action, and cognition.”

IBM’s long-term goal is to build a chip system with ten billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses, while consuming one kilowatt of power and occupying less than two liters of volume.

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/medical-and-healthcare/in-depth/tailored-treatments-sensors-for-personalised-medicine/1016865.article

Doctors are still dependant on single point-in-time measurements of factors such as blood glucose and hormone levels, which do not show how these factors dip or rise into danger zones over the course of a day.   Similarly, monitoring heart rates over time in a hospital does not always show the physical responses caused by everyday stresses.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/stem.1473/abstract

Professor Antonio del Sol of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine has developed a model that makes predictions from which differentiated cells, such as skin cells, can be very changed into completely different cell types, such as nerve cells.  Embryonic stem cells are not used.  Researcher Issac Crespo describes the process: “Our theoretical model first queries databases where vast amounts of information on gene actions and their effects are stored and then identifies the genes that maintain the stability of differentiated cells. Working from the appropriate records, the model suggests which genes in the starting cells need to be switched on and off again, and when, in order to change them into a different cell type.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-22/medtronic-insulin-pump-cuts-deadly-night-blood-sugar-lows.html

Medtronic has designed an insulin pump that temporarily shuts off when blood sugar levels fall too low—a key advance in the effort to fully automate the delivery of insulin in diabetes patients.  Current technology allows people who use insulin pumps to wear a sensor that measures the amount of blood sugar in the body, which helps them program pumps to deliver the appropriate amount of insulin. Researchers have been trying to link the two technologies in order to automate insulin delivery, to create what has been referred to as an artificial pancreas.

http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/108/

Harvard researchers are developing a device that could be used to rapidly remove pathogens from the blood of patients with sepsis.  The dialysis-like machine acts as an artificial spleen, filtering the blood using injectable magnetic nanobeads engineered to stick to microorganisms and toxins.  After the beads are injected, blood is removed and run through a device that uses a magnetic-field gradient to extract the nanobead-bound germs. The blood is then returned to the body.  The team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering hopes that the device will be able to identify the specific microorganism causing the patient’s blood infection.  This could help physicians more quickly determine the most effective antibiotic treatment.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130524-zapping-bacteria-the-wireless-way

Professor John Rogers of the University of Illinois has created bio-absorbable electronic circuits which could be implanted into wounds and powered wirelessly to destroy bacteria during healing before dissolving harmlessly into body fluids once their job is done.  Rogers and others have previously reported biodegradable flexible circuits and electronic devices that can be safely laid directly onto skin. But their success in making their circuits wireless could prove crucial to many potential applications, especially in medicine.

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-d-printer-synthetic-tissues.html

Oxford University scientists have created a custom-built programmable 3D printer that can create materials with several of the properties of living tissues.

The new type of material consists of thousands of connected water droplets, encapsulated within lipid films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. These printed ‘droplet networks’ could be the building blocks of a new kind of technology for delivering drugs to places where they are needed and potentially one day replacing or interfacing with damaged human tissues. Because droplet networks are entirely synthetic, have no genome and do not replicate, they avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to creating artificial tissues – such as those that use stem cells.

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibm_predictions_for_future/ideas/index.html

IBM published its annual report, this year focusing on the five basic senses.  Highlighted future abilities of computers include:

-the ability to identify distinctive image features, foregoing the need for tags

-the development a sense of taste

-smelling computers that detect explosives in the public and cancer in our bodies

-touch sensitivity, allowing us to feel textures

http://blogs.computerworld.com/healthcare-it/21405/top-four-trends-will-shape-digital-health

As we approach 2013, the following trends continue to spawn companies, investment, and technologies:

1. The proliferation of personalized mobile health technologies. 
2. The maturation of the Big Data ecosystem in health care.
3. The rise of health startup accelerators.
4. The emergence of health care exchange and alternative care delivery platforms.