Forget stomach stapling and lap band surgery. The next big thing in weight loss surgery may be the stomach pacemaker. More »
Even if it’s this creepy, pulsating rig assembled from gutted Bravias, Walkmen and VAIO for a British football commercial. But where is all the blood?
The main complaints about the current Nike+ Gear aren’t that it doesn’t do a good job keeping track of how far you run, it’s that it doesn’t measure stuff like heart rate, body temperature and other factors runners care about. Nike hears you. Their latest patent for upcoming Nike+ gear expands on the current concept and features all kinds of sensors over a person’s body, even possibly adding a GPS receiver so you can automatically map out the path you took on your run.
Some of the same kind of health telemetry that the French army may be using could be yours in the new VitalJacket product. It’s a smart T-shirt with a built-in electrocardiogram monitor, designed for both medical diagnostics and sports fitness uses. It’s supposed to be less awkward than conventional devices, as well as more comfortable. The HWM200 version sends data on the wearer’s heart over a Bluetooth link to a phone or PDA, allowing real-time monitoring. The 100 version stores it on an SD card for later analysis on a PC and allows the wearer to define heart rate limits which trigger a vibration alarm in the shirt. Both editions are available for pre-order for around US$635. [Vitaljacket via Talk2myshirt]
DRE, the Louisville medical tech company, has just unleashed the world’s smallest ECG system. The compact device consists of the obligatory 12 leads and a small attachment that carries the necessary software for ECG interpretation. The Universal ECG hooks directly up to desktop PCs, laptops or Pocket PCs running Windows XP or 2000.
Most of us would never need an electrocardiogram embedded into our mobile phones to monitor our hearts, but most of us aren’t recovering from a heart attack. For those people that are, this Swedish invention that turns any old mobile into a monitor that can automatically call a doctor or the hospital if your heart explodes is something they’d pay loads and loads of Swedish kronas for. Or meatballs. We think they’re pretty much interchangeable. [The Inquirer]
These MP3 players grab on to every single lovey-dovey Valentine’s cliché: a separable pair of players for you and your other half, that look like kissing lovers when they’re stuck together in a cutesy heart shape. We don’t know where you can buy them, but we do know they’ve got touch controls, have 1GB memory each, cost the equivalent of $61 in China and are absolutely sick-makingly hideous. [Zol, New Launches]
