Medical

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has long mandated the use of quality systems to ensure that medical devices are safe and effective for their intended purpose for both the patient and the operator of the device. As Jay Thomas of LDRA Technology highlights, that safety and effectiveness also relies on security in the increasingly connected medical environment.

Thousands of errors occur in hospitals every day. Catching them, or even tracking them, is frustratingly ad-hoc. However, connectivity and intelligent distributed medical systems are set to dramatically improve the situation. This is the revolution that the Internet of Things (IoT) promises for patient safety. Stan Schneider, CEO Real-Time Innovations (RTI), explains.

In developing nations, the current test to diagnose TB is error-prone, complicated and time-consuming. Furthermore, patients in these resource-limited areas can't easily travel back to a clinic at a later date to get their results. To make diagnoses simpler, faster and more accurate, chemists have developed a quick and easy diagnostic tool. Field trials of the experimental test began in June in South Africa, which has a high incidence of TB.

Whether severe trauma occurs on the battlefield or the highway, saving lives often comes down to stopping the bleeding as quickly as possible. Many methods for controlling external bleeding exist, but at this point, only surgery can halt blood loss inside the body from injury to internal organs. Now, researchers have developed nanoparticles that congregate wherever injury occurs in the body to help it form blood clots, and they've validated these...

Dubbed the ‘silent killer’, and more commonly known as ‘blood poisoning’, Sepsis is a whole-body inflammatory reaction that kills over 20,000 people per day worldwide, striking regardless of age, gender or fitness and killing more people than prostate cancer, breast cancer and HIV/AIDS combined. It is estimated that 44,000 people die every year from Sepsis in the UK alone.

Epilepsy, a neurological condition that causes repeated seizures also known as fits, can occur in people anywhere and at any time without warning. Neurone cells use electrical impulses to communicate with each other and during a fit, the electrical impulses in the brain are disrupted. 

The developing world is awash in substandard, degraded or falsified medications, which can either directly harm users or deprive them of needed treatment. And with internet sales of medications on the rise, people everywhere are increasingly at risk. So, a team of researchers has developed a simple, inexpensive paper-based device to screen suspicious medications. The researchers will present their work at the 252nd National Meeting & Exp...

Most people start racking up scars from an early age with scraped knees and elbows. While many of these fade over time, more severe types such as keloids and scars from burns are largely untreatable. These types of scars are associated with permanent functional loss and, in severe cases, carry the stigma of disfigurement. Now scientists are developing new compounds that could stop scars from forming in the first place.

MIT biological engineers have devised a way to record complex histories in the DNA of human cells, allowing them to retrieve "memories” of past events, such as inflammation, by sequencing the DNA. This analogue memory storage system is the first that can record the duration and/or intensity of events in human cells.

Blood-testing technology that promises to improve healthcare treatments for cancer patients, post-operative care and monitor the health of babies in the womb is being developed by Lancaster academics. A portable bedside blood diagnostics device is the focus of a collaborative research project.