Disease

6 Articles

Ask Hackaday: Could Rating Airlines Stop Flights From Spreading Diseases?

December 6, 2023 by 82 Comments

 

A few weeks ago, I found myself the victim of flights from hell. My first flight was cancelled, leaving me driving home late at night, only to wake again for a red-eye the next morning. That was cancelled as well, with the second replacement delayed by a further hour. All in all I ended up spending a good ten hours extra in the airport surrounded by tired, sick, and coughing individuals, and ended up a full 16 hours late to my destination. On the return, I’d again tangle with delays, and by the weekend’s close, I’d contracted a nasty flu for my trouble.

All this had me riled up and looking for revenge. I had lost hours of my life to these frustrations, and the respiratory havoc claimed a further week of my working life. It had me realizing that we could surely improve the performance and hygiene of our airliners with a simple idea: a website called Flights From Hell.

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Inverse Vaccines Could Help Treat Autoimmune Conditions

September 25, 2023 by 78 Comments

Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system starts attacking the body’s own cells. They can cause a wide range of deleterious symptoms that greatly reduce a patient’s quality of life. Treatments often involve globally suppressing the immune system, which can lead to a host of undesirable side effects.

However, researchers at the University of Chicago might have found a workaround by tapping into the body’s own control mechanisms. It may be possible to hack the immune system and change its targeting without disabling it entirely. The new technique of creating “inverse vaccines” could revolutionize the treatment of autoimmune conditions.

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App Detects Parkinsons Disease And COVID-19 Via Audio

November 28, 2022 by 20 Comments

One of the challenges of diagnosing diseases is identifying them early. At this stage, signs may be vague or confusing, or difficult to identify. Early diagnosis is often tied to the best possible treatment outcomes, so there’s plenty of incentives to improve methods in this way.

A new voice-based method of diagnosing disease could prove fruitful in this regard. It relies on machine learning techniques to detect when patients may be suffering from certain conditions.

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Genetically Modified Mosquitos: Biohacking For Disease Prevention

May 3, 2021 by 43 Comments

Many years ago, I took a summer trip to the Maryland shore with some friends. One of my buddies and I got bored with playing football on the beach, so we decided to take a hike on one of the many trails back into the wooded area behind the dunes. At the trailhead we noticed a prominent sign, warning about the presence of “very aggressive mosquitos” and not to enter without first applying ample insect repellent. We scoffed at the warning as only young idiots could and soldiered on, bare-legged and confident that we’d be fine.

About three minutes into our hike, a small group came pelting down the trail in a panic. “It’s true! Turn back!” they shouted as they flew past us. Undeterred, or at least unwilling to appear that way to each other, we pressed on, only to discover a few minutes later that we were making a substantial blood sacrifice to the next generation of mosquitos on Assateague Island. We couldn’t bear more than a few seconds before turning tail and running back to the beach and jumping into the ocean to get rid of the last few dozen bloodsuckers.

I learned a valuable lesson from that experience, as well as developing a deep and abiding hatred of mosquitos. It turns out I’m in good company — pretty much everyone hates mosquitos, which are not just a nuisance but can be downright dangerous to be around. But if tests with genetically engineered mosquitos currently underway in Florida turn out well, we may be able to finally turn the tide against mosquito-borne diseases, simply by killing all the females before they ever reach adulthood.

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Internal Power Pills

June 12, 2018 by 20 Comments

Arguably the biggest hurdle to implanted electronics is in the battery. A modern mobile phone can run for a day or two without a charge, but that only needs to fit into a pocket and were its battery to enter a dangerous state it can be quickly removed from the pocket. Implantable electronics are not so easy to toss on the floor. If the danger of explosion or poison isn’t enough, batteries for implantables and ingestibles are just too big.

Researchers at MIT are working on a new technology which could move the power source outside of the body and use a wireless power transfer system to energize things inside the body. RFID implants are already tried and tested, but they also seem to be the precursor to this technology. The new implants receive multiple signals from an array of antennas, but it is not until a couple of the antennas peak simultaneously that the device can harvest enough power to activate. With a handful of antennas all supplying power, this happens regularly enough to power a device 0.1m below the skin while the antenna array is 1m from the patient. Multiple implants can use those radio waves at the same time.

The limitations of these devices will become apparent, but they could be used for releasing drugs at prescribed times, sensing body chemistry, or giving signals to the body. At this point, just being able to get the devices to turn on so far under flesh is pretty amazing.

Recently, we asked what you thought of the future of implanted technology and the comment section of that article is a treasure trove of opinions. Maybe this changes your mind or solidifies your opinion.

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I’m A Tricorder, Not A Doctor, Jim!

April 28, 2017 by 14 Comments

Machine learning and automated technologies are poised to disrupt employment in many industries — looking at you autonomous vehicles — and medicine is not immune to this encroachment. The Qualcomm Tricorder competition run by the X-Prize foundation has just wrapped, naming [Final Frontier Medical Devices]’s DxtER the closest thing available to Star Trek’s illustrious medical tricorder which is an oft referenced benchmark for diagnostic automation.

The competition’s objective was for teams to develop a handheld, non-invasive device that could diagnose 12 diseases and an all-clear result in 24 hours or less without any assistance. [Dynamical Biomarkers Group] took second place prize worth $1 million, with [Final Frontier Medical devices] — a company run by two brothers and mostly financed by themselves and their siblings — snagging the top prize of $2.5 million. DxtER comes equipped with a suite of sensors to monitor your vitals and body chemistry, and is actually able to diagnose 34 conditions well in advance of the time limit by monitoring vital signs and comparing them to a wealth of medical databases and encyclopediae. The future, as they say, is now.

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