I’ve never had the pleasure of breaking a bone, but if I did, you can bet I’d be wearing a Casttoo to share my innermost threshold for pain with the world.

Casttoos are customizable cast decals. You email in the image of your choice—yes, X-rays work great, though a shattered Terminator endoskeleton might be a valid secondary option—and they’ll mail you out a decal that can be affixed via hairdryer. Prices range anywhere from $20-$40, but hopefully, if you’re on decent pain meds at the time, you’ll have no issues shrugging off the small purchase. [Castoos via bookofjoe via DVICE]

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Playing doctor and nurse used to be so affordable as a kid. Nowadays, you need to fork out $69.99 for an iPhone app, and $279.99 for an additional stethoscope. Still, you can’t put a price on saving lives, right?

Not that you’ll be saving too many lives by connecting a stethoscope to an iPhone, and using an app that displays the heartbeat in its arty, wiggly form. But you can record the sound of a heartbeat, and even email it to your doctor if you’re particularly worried. I think the scope (pardon the pun) of such an app is pretty limited, but those with serious medical conditions who need to get their heart rate checked constantly might find some use in it. [ThinkLabs via MedGadget via CrunchGear]

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Playing doctor and nurse used to be so affordable as a kid. Nowadays, you need to fork out $69.99 for an iPhone app, and $279.99 for a stethoscope. Still, you can’t put a price on saving lives, right?

Not that you’ll be saving too many lives with just a stethoscope and an app that displays the heartbeat in its arty, wiggly form. But you can record the sound of a heartbeat, and even email it to your doctor if you’re particularly worried. I think the scope (pardon the pun) of such an app is pretty limited, but those with serious medical conditions who need to get their heart rate checked constantly might find some use in it. [ThinkLabs via MedGadget via CrunchGear]

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Playing doctor and nurse used to be so affordable as a kid. Nowadays, you need to fork out $69.99 for an iPhone app, and $279.99 for a stethoscope. Still, you can’t put a price on saving lives, right?

Not that you’ll be saving too many lives with just a stethoscope and an app that displays the heartbeat in its arty, wiggly form. But you can record the sound of a heartbeat, and even email it to your doctor if you’re particularly worried. I think the scope (pardon the pun) of such an app is pretty limited, but those with serious medical conditions who need to get their heart rate checked constantly might find some use in it. [ThinkLabs via MedGadget via CrunchGear]

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Even DARPA understands that its futuristic bubble shield can be penetrated given the right circumstances, and when it does, the soldier behind it is going to need some serious healing. In a hurry. In the entity’s newest budget, there’s $6.5 million tucked away “for the creation of a scaffold-free tissue engineering platform, which would allow the construction of large, complex tissues in vitro and in vivo.” As you well know, this type of mad science has been around for quite some time, and now it looks as if DARPA is ready for the next best thing: “non-contact forces.” Put simply, this alludes to replacing scaffolds with magnetic fields or dielectrophoresis, which could purportedly “control cell placement in a desired pattern for a sufficient period of time to allow the cells to synthesize their own scaffold.” It’s still too early to say how close we are to being able to instantaneously heal soldiers on the battlefield, but frankly, the public is apt to never know for sure.

DARPA longs for magnetic body healers, crazy respawn camps originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Years of battling cancer have left film ubercritic Roger Ebert without a portion of his jaw, and consequentially, his voice. Esquire’s superb profile outlined his efforts to regain a voice—his voice—but left us wondering: How will that work?

From Esquire:

Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don’t all have to sound like Stephen Hawking… CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.

CereProc is headquartered on the sixth floor of an imposingly ugly tower in Edinburgh, Scotland—I’d know, because it was in the five floors below that I spent most of my undergrad career at the University of Edinburgh, which owns the building. By all counts, it’s a small operation, and a relatively new one, started about five years ago.

But I checked into CereProc’s work online, and their sample voice sets speak for themselves, so to speak (sorry and sorry!): Obama sounds like a slightly more hesitant Obama; Arnie, whose verbal tics are his trademark, sounds like almost exactly like Arnie. (You can listen to both, and others, here and here.) Listening to what they can do with publicly available voice data sets is heartening, so the prospects for a man with such a broad catalog of vocal recordings, from radio broadcasts to his TV show to old podcasts, seem fantastic. He felt the same way when he discovered CereProc back in August:

I have my fingers crossed. I have launched an e-mail to Edinburgh with my appeal. I can see my own voice hosting online or telecast video essays. I am greatly cheered.

CereProc got that email, and answered his appeal. So!

The first step would be a desktop software system, which would dictate text in the same way that Mac OS does natively. While this would be a great bridge, but a mobile solution would really change things. CereProc’s software is licensable for just about anything, and has already been incorporated into an iPhone app, albeit for simple news dictation.

In other words, a voiced Ebert is something the he (and we!) can realistically look forward to. And by this, we too are greatly cheered. [CereProc, Esquire]

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Neurologists have built an ultrasound device which uses focused sound waves to destroy stroke-causing blood clots in brains. The procedure is non-invasive—requiring no drugs or surgery—and is already being tested on patients.

The machine and procedure allows doctors to “surround the head with an array of transducers that can focus ultrasound beams on a single spot in the brain without damaging the skull.” This means that diseased tissue could be destroyed without any collateral damage or risky surgery. [Technology Review via Pop Sci]

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Soap is dead. Never stood a chance, really. It had a good run, but the age of disinfecting our hands in plasma-gas filled boxes has finally dawned.

As the NY TImes has it, several laboratories are working on the technology, which bathes your hand in room-temperature plasma gas to kill even industrial grade bacteria like MRSA. Or your foot, to knock down athlete’s foot.

It’s got a clear and present destiny in hospital use, where doctors and nurses could kill off lingering bacteria, viruses, and fungi in as little as four seconds—as opposed to the time-intensive scrubbing process they endure today.

Prototypes exist today that are both portable and wall-mounted, and they can cost as little as $100 to build. And it won’t stop at just hand sanitizers: eventually you may see plasma gas incorporated into air-conditioning systems and burn treatments.

It’s been real, soap. I’ll remember you fondly in those four seconds while I’m washing up before dinner. [NY Times via DVice]

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Alright, we’ll leave all the zingers for you and our mercurial staff to deliver, and just use this space to dish some info on the hardware. Ivor Kovic, an emergency physician from Croatia, has recently demoed a new iPhone cradle that turns the already multifunctional handset into a CPR assistance device. By using an app titled Pocket CPR and the built-in accelerometer, he can get audio and visual feedback to tell him if he’s doing it correctly, while his basic (but awesome) cradle allows for longer CPR sessions if necessary. Check out the video after the break, then hit the comments with your finest witticisms.

Paul: “Come on Luke Wilson’s Career, stay with me now, you’re not going to die on me!”
Darren: “Man, I could really get a better look at what’s going on if this thing had a 9.7-inch IPS panel…”
Chris: “Everyone is either dying or staying alive these days, and we began to ask ourselves: is there room for something in the middle?”
Nilay: “He then died.”
Vlad: “Our other cradle also measures rhythm and depth, though its purpose isn’t entirely medicinal.”
Andy: “A rare case where a lack of multitasking is actually helpful to the task on hand.”
Thomas: “Can you stop dying for a second, I have to take this call.”
Joe: “This actually adds an intriguing level of complexity to Super Monkey Ball 2.”
Richard Lai: “Come on… COME ON!! Wait a tick… AT&T? No wonder it isn’t working. Dammit.”
Tim: “Looks like this guy’s heart (puts on sunglasses)… has dropped its last call.” Yeeeaaaaaahhhh…

Continue reading Caption contest: iPhone as a CPR device

Caption contest: iPhone as a CPR device originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A British doctor was so kind as to write a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, handily summarizing what is known about Nintendo-related injuries. The gist: Your Wii wants you dead.

The point of the letter was to highlight a new case, in which a girl hurt her foot playing Wii Fit. But in the process, it provides a tidy little history of ways people have managed to injure themselves playing video games.

• Nintendinitis: This is the classic videogame injury, and one you’ve probably heard of before. This is a repetitive stress injury in the “extensor tendon of [the] thumb,” which you can get from pretty much any game console.

• Wiiitis: Sounds like something a lot of people have probably just slept off:

A healthy 29-year-old medical resident awoke one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently. He consulted a rheumatology colleague. The Patte’s test was positive, consistent with acute tendonitis isolated to the right infraspinatus.

After just a day with the Wii, this kid was out of commission for a week. What does Nintendo have against healthy tendons?

• Traumatic Hemothorax: If this sounds terrifying, you probably did well in Latin class. Doctors have apparently documented the cavities around patients’ lungs filling with blood after Wii-related falls. This can kill you.

• Dislocations: This one is the most predictable of the lot, since honestly, who hasn’t gotten carried away trying to Happy-Gilmore-bowl their way through Wii Sports? And anyway, fake sport/real injury humor is universal.

• Head Injuries: Wiimote straps may save your HDTV, but they won’t save your kid sister from getting clocked in the skull while you’re playing Zelda.

• Wii Fracture: This is the new one:

In the United Kingdom, a healthy 14-year-old girl presented to the emergency department at Horton General Hospital in Banbury (near Oxford), having sustained an injury to her right foot with associated difficulty in mobilization. She had been playing on her Wii Fit balance board and had fallen off, sustaining an inversion injury.

Apparently, rolling your foot off the side of the balance board—which, really, anyone who’s played Wii Fit has done multiple times—can be enough to crack a bone in your foot.

So basically your Wii is actively trying to maim you and your children, the end. [NEJM—Thanks, Michael from Medgadget!]

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