This is not going to all be about getting your books, or your socks, or even your new HD television faster. It is going to impact many industries -- including health care. And that impact has already started to happen. Zipline International, for example, is already delivering medical supplies by drone in Rwanda. They deliver directly to isolated clinics despite any intervening "challenging terrain and gaps in infrastructure." They plan to limit themselves to medical supplies, but not only in developing countries; they see rural areas in the U.S. as potential opportunities as well. Last fall they raised $25 million in Series B funding. Drones are also being considered for medical supply delivery in Guyana, Haiti, and the Philippines...
DARPA
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10 of Today's Really Cool Network & IT Research Projects
University at Buffalo and Northeastern University researchers are developing hardware and software to enable underwater telecommunications to catch up with over-the-air networks. This advancement could be a boon for search-and-rescue operations, tsunami detection, environmental monitoring and more. Sound waves used underwater are just no match for the radio waves used in over-the-air communications, but the researchers are putting smart software-defined radio technology to work in combination with underwater acoustic modems...
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A DIY Pharmaceutical Revolution Is Coming—If It Doesn’t Kill Us First
As Mixael Laufer tells it, the vision came to him in El Salvador. Laufer was visiting Central America as a human rights envoy, touring a tiny, rural mountain town with the Marin County Peace and Justice Coalition. When he arrived at the town’s medical clinic, it had just run out of birth control. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a country where there are there are methamphetamine and ecstasy labs everywhere. Birth control isn’t that much more complicated,’” Laufer told Gizmodo. “‘Why aren’t these people just making their own birth control?’”...
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DARPA's Look into Starships Can Inform Our Search for Health
The first question most people had when they heard about the DARPA 100YSS Study was, “Why is DARPA interested in how to build a space ship a hundred years from now?” DARPA is known for far out projects, like the Internet itself, but even this seemed far out for them. Read More »
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Getting Health IT on the Blockchain Bandwagon
Face it: health care IT infrastructure is a mess. After spending tens of billions of dollars to "incent" providers to move to EHRs, they're using them but are not very happy with them. In a world in which health IT systems should help improve patient care, they're seen more as a burden than as an asset. We now have millions of electronic records that are still way too siloed, and all too often incomplete. Worse yet, when those records aren't being hacked, they are being held captive by ransomware. Enter blockchain.
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Nanoparticles On My Mind
Nanoparticles are everywhere! By that I mean, of course, that there seems to be a lot of news about them lately, particularly in regard to health and healthcare.But, of course, literally they could be anywhere and everywhere, which helps account for their potential, and their potential danger. Let's start with one of the more startling developments: a team at the University of Miami's College of Engineering, led by Professor Sakhrat Khizroev, believes it has figured out a way to use nanoparticles to "talk" to the brain without wires or implants.They use "a novel class of ultrafine units called magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs)" to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
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New Prosthetic Arm Born From 'Star Wars'
In the movie “The Empire Strikes Back,” Luke Skywalker’s hand is severed in a battle with Darth Vader and replaced by a futuristic prosthetic. Now science fiction is becoming science fact as the Defense Department funds the development of the “Luke Arm,” which may replace limbs that veterans have lost in battle. Read More »
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Rise of Drones for Medical Supply Delivery
Why One Tech-Savvy Aid Worker Had to Flee Afghanistan
Gold, a lieutenant in the North Carolina National Guard who deployed to Iraq in 2009, didn’t think it would turn out this way. She and her friends had started a tech-heavy aid company, the International Synergy Group, that brought Gold to Afghanistan in May 2010. With some contract cash from the blue-sky researchers at Darpa, Gold sought to use mobile applications to get agriculture and health data into the hands of Afghans, particularly for pregnant women in need of natal-care facts, through the use of open-source software favored by aid workers like Ushahidi or FrontlineSMS...
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