Posts tagged sci-tech
Man to Travel 200 Miles in Solar-Powered Wheelchair
Chances are, you haven’t heard of Haidar Taleb yet, but he’s on a mission to inspire the world. On Monday, the disabled 47-year-old from the UAE is set to embark on a record-breaking 200 mile voyage across the desert in a solar-powered wheelchair he designed and built himself. “With this journey I hope to raise awareness of disability and sustainability as well as what we can achieve as individuals if we have the courage and determination to try,” he says. (more…)
Green Light for Blindness Stem Cell Trial
Twelve people left almost blind by a hereditary condition that strikes in childhood are to receive the world’s first eye therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs).
Stargardt’s macular dystrophy currently affects 1 in 8,000 people in the US. Their sight deteriorates from around age six when retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPEs) start to die off rapidly, possibly due to a defective gene. Without RPEs to support and nourish them, adjacent photoreceptor cells which capture light signals, die too and blindness is the result. (more…)
Hospital ‘Bespoke’ Knees Up
Orthopaedic surgeon James Murray with patient June Hockey.
A Bristol hospital is pioneering the use of a new technology which creates ‘tailor-made’ knee replacements.
The Visionaire system, which is produced by global healthcare company Smith & Nephew, is targeted at people who have developed painful knee arthritis, sometimes following knee ligament damage while playing sport earlier in life, or more frequently as part of the degenerative process of osteoarthritis which affects many people, typically in their 60s and 70s.
First the patient has an X-ray and a scan of their knee. A model of the knee is then created by computer modelling, followed by two “bespoke” nylon cutting blocks. The blocks – one made to match the patient’s femur and the other, the tibia – are then sterilised and sent to the orthopaedic surgeon ready for the procedure. (more…)
Don’t Get Out Much? New Online Forum Could Be For You.
A new online forum aims to help carers and people who have impairments or health conditions that keep them from leaving home.
The website founders, Dav and Calsie, have personal experience of being ‘housebound’ and felt there was not enough quality services or support for housebound people.
Understanding that family members are often busy and don’t always understand certain situations which cause people to be housebound, the couple have developed a site which allows users to chat with people in similar situations to themselves. (more…)
Implanted Chip ‘Allows Blind People to Detect Objects’
A man with an inherited form of blindness has been able to identify letters and a clock face using a pioneering implant, researchers say.
Miikka Terho, 46, from Finland, was fitted with an experimental chip behind his retina in Germany. Success was also reported in other patients.
The chip allows a patient to detect objects with their eyes, unlike a rival approach that uses an external camera.
Source: BBC News
Medtronic Debuts Tiny Lead-Less Pacemaker at TEDMED 2010
There are two pacemakers in the picture above. There’s the typical clunky, stone shaped device with wires on the right — and on the left, a device dwarfed even by a one-cent coin. This is the Medtronic wireless pacemaker, just revealed at TEDMED 2010, which can be implanted directly into your heart via catheter and permanently latch itself into flesh with tiny claws. Then, doctors can wirelessly monitor and even control the device from a nearby smartphone.
Via Engadget
