Wilson Greatbatch has died at the age of 92. He was a lifelong inventor. And like many inventors, his most notable creation, the implantable cardiac pacemaker, was discovered accidentally.
Forget stomach stapling and lap band surgery. The next big thing in weight loss surgery may be the stomach pacemaker.
The Tonium Pacemaker, contrary to its name, will not maintain your heart’s natural beat from the inside. It’s a portable DJ system, packing a 60/120GB HDD, that simplifies the DJing process in a pocket-sized package.
More wireless medical implants mean more ways for criminals to remotely attack people, and now Harvard researchers have proven it’s possible to hack a wireless pacemaker/defibrillator with potentially fatal results. Lead scientist William Maisel says such attacks are unlikely, but that might not be the case for long. We know most hackers use their power for good, but it’s those bad apples that hack power grids and attack the internet we should be worried about. [NewScientist]
A group of researchers from the Medical Device Security Center (who would’ve thought we needed one of those?) have demonstrated wireless vulnerabilities in some cardiac monitor-pacemakers that may allow someone to remotely deactivate them while they’re implanted in a patient. Now that’s what I call malicious.
DJing on the bus, at work, in the supermarket and in line at the RTA may sound like a pipe dream, but this pocketable Tonium Pacemaker DJ system lets you do just that. We got hands-on of this at CES, but Kat from TechDigest takes it for a “spin” (worst. pun. ever.) and finds that it’s actually quite good if you ever need to liven up a party with your sub-par DJing skills. Check out the review over at TD. [Tech Digest and Pacemaker]
The electromagnetic fields from iPods won’t interfere with cardiac pacemakers, says an FDA research team, contrary to last year’s rumours. After a whole bunch of experiments using saline-filled bags and sensitive coil detectors to simulate the effect of a variety iPods on the body, the researchers concluded “that no interference effects can occur in pacemakers exposed to the iPods we tested.” [Reuters]
newVideoPlayer("pacemakerhandson.flv", 475, 286,"gizmodo_ces_2008.png");
A few months ago we showed you Pacemaker’s pocket-sized DJ system, which at first glance seemed like a interestingly entertaining product. After a video demonstration by company DJ Ola Sars, the Pacemaker appears to be even more fun than we originally imagined. Even-though it has been over six months since we showed you the party in your pants DJ system, it still has the same specs; 120GB hard drive, USB 2.0 support, a touchpad, and various other DJ-ing functions (including loop-in, loop-out, re-loop, cue point search, and other things we have no idea about). [Tonium]
