Health and Wellbeing

It’s a sad fact of life that as we age, our cognitive skills decline. In particular, the “executive function” of our mind diminishes – this function is a key aspect of our memory, attention, perception, and problem solving skills. There may be help, however. Scientists from the University of Iowa are now claiming that by playing a specific video game, test subjects aged 50 and over were able to stop and even reverse the trend.  Read More

With the nasty tendency of its airborne fibers to cause lung cancer, the installation of asbestos building insulation has been banned in many countries for some time now. A lot of buildings still have the insulation, however, the fibers of which can get stirred up when work such as renovations or demolition are being performed. In order to help protect the people performing such work, scientists at the University of Hertfordshire have developed what they say is the world’s first portable, real-time detector of airborne asbestos.  Read More

When someone is feeling sick, you take their temperature to see if they’re running a fever. That’s the way it’s been for decades. However, all that a regular thermometer will tell you is their body temperature – it won’t tell you what they might have, or what you should do. The Kinsa Smart Thermometer, while not quite a medical tricorder, is designed to do those things.  Read More

One of the things that makes heart disease so problematic is the fact that after a heart attack occurs, the scar tissue that replaces the damaged heart tissue isn’t capable of expanding and contracting – it doesn’t “beat,” in other words. This leaves the heart permanently weakened. Now, however, scientists from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) have developed artificial heart tissue that may ultimately provide a solution to that problem.  Read More

While lower back pain can have a variety of causes, poor posture is one of the most common culprits. Already there are a number of wearable devices available – such as the Lumoback and iPosture pendant – that detect when the user’s posture is improper, and alert them to the situation so they can correct it. The new Lumbia is one other product that performs this service, although it also provides data to therapists to assist in the treatment of back problems.  Read More

It’s an unfortunate fact that prescription painkiller abuse is on the rise. In some cases people are taking the drugs to get high, while in others, patients simply want more relief than their prescription allows. In either scenario, the results are often fatal. That’s why a group of engineering students from Brigham Young University have created a lockable medication-dispensing device known as the Med Vault.  Read More

The HAPIfork is a "smart fork" designed to monitor your eating habits that gained a great deal of press attention at the beginning of the year when it was one of the stars of CES 2013. Now it's arrived on Kickstarter in an effort to raise US$100,000 to fund the initial product launch.  Read More

It can be lethal, it makes patients ill for weeks and there’s no vaccine against it. Cases of dengue fever, whose symptoms usually include high temperature, body ache and fatigue, have increased 30-fold in the last 50 years. The World Health Organization estimates that around 50 to 100 million people are infected yearly and 2.5 billion people live in risk areas. After a successful trial run in Australia, a promising development that uses a common bacteria to fight dengue is about to be tried in one of the most affected countries in the world – Brazil.  Read More

Bored of run-of-the-mill home exercise options like the stationary bike and treadmill? Austrian manufacturer DIMOVE recently introduced a full-body workout contraption called the WAVEpro. This challenging piece of equipment will hone your balance, endurance, muscle tone ... and will to survive.  Read More