MONITOR GLAUCOMA WITH AN EYE IMPLANT AND A PHONE

Lowering a patient’s internal eye pressure is currently the only way to treat glaucoma. A tiny eye implant paired with a smart phone could help doctors measure and lower eye pressure.

For the 2.2 million Americans battling glaucoma, the main course of action for staving off blindness involves weekly visits to eye specialists who monitor—and control—increasing pressure within the eye.

Now, a tiny eye implant could enable patients to take more frequent readings from the comfort of home. Daily or hourly measurements of eye pressure could help doctors tailor more effective treatment plans.

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Vibrating Electronic Glove Teaches People to Read/Write in Braille with Little to No Effort

Reading and writing in Braille can be a frustrating new skill that people who lost their eyesight have to learn. Typically, to become a natural at Braille requires many hours of learning, but researchers at Georgia Tech developed a glove that can help learn Braille without even thinking about it.

The electronic glove has vibrating motors sitting atop each knuckle and was originally used toteach people to play piano. The knuckles can be made to vibrate in different patterns that correspond to phrases written in Braille. In studies, to be presented at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) in Seattle in September, the researchers had volunteers wear the glove while focusing on learning Braille, while other participants played unrelated video games during the same Braille learning sequences. Remarkably, even those that didn’t consciously focus on Braille were able to repeat writing phrases taught by the glove. Moreover, not only did writing of Braille improve, but the study participants were also able to read Braille with greater ease.

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Grandmother Uses Oculus Rift as Therapy

GOOGLE IS KNOWN FOR ITS ZANY OFFICE DESIGNS, FROM STROOPWAFEL CEILINGS TO SLIDES TO SCOOTERS. AND YOU THOUGHT YOUR OFFICE'S FOOSBALL TABLE 

WAS COOL.

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20 Apps You’ll Need for Better Instagram Pics and Videos

Instagram can be a powerful marketing tool when used correctly. But plain cell phone photos with vintage inspired filters can only go so far. Luckily, there are plenty more apps available to enhance Instagram photos and videos even further. We asked around to find some favorites among Instagram users. Below are 20 of them.
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via HolyKaw

Meet the 'Most Connected Man' in the World

And you thought managing a smartphone and an inbox was exhausting.

45-year-old Chris Dancy is known as the most connected man in the world. He has between 300 and 700 systems running at any given time, systems that capture real-time data about his life.

His wrists are covered with a variety of wearable technology, including the fitness wristband tracker Fitbit and the Pebble smartwatch. He weighs himself on the Aria Wi-Fi scale, uses smartphone controlled Hue lighting at home and sleeps on a Beddit mattress cover to track his sleep.

Even Dancy's dogs are tracked via Tagg, which logs their daily activities.

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Finally, a Way to Make a Selfie Statue

In this, the Age of the Selfie, it figurines: You can now get yourself made into a tiny statue, using a three-dimensional printer and a common household gaming device.

The product is called Shapify.me. It uses the motion sensors in aMicrosoft Kinect to scan a customer’s full body, by taking information from eight different angles. Once a person gets the 3D image they like, an on-demand printing company called Sculpteocranks out a statue about four inches high, which is shipped to the customer.

The company behind Shapify.me, a Russian firm called Artec Group, thinks this could me more than a home curiosity.

“This is exactly what people did in the early history of photography – they got dressed up and took pictures of themselves,” said Artem Yukhin, the company’s founder and chairman. “Now, people want to scan themselves, and make little statues of themselves.”

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Two Posts on Prosthetic Hands

Two great posts from Guy Kawasaki on prosthetic hands

New Bionic Hand Gives Amputee a Grip — And a Sense of Touch

Dennis Aabo Sørensen lost his left hand in a fireworks accident during a family holiday when he was in his mid-twenties. Last year, the 36-year-old Danish man got a chance to test out a new prosthetic hand that connected to his nervous system and allowed him to grip and manipulate objects. Even more remarkably, he actually felt what he was touching for the first time in the 9 years since his accident, according to a report published today in Science Translational Medicine.

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Kansas teen uses 3-D printer to make hand for boy

Mason Wilde has always had a passion for figuring out how things work.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/31/4790811/kansas-teen-uses-3-d-printer-to.html#storylink=cpy

When he was 4 years old, he took apart his mother’s dining room table and gliding ottoman.

Last year, he built a computer, pretty much from scratch.

But it’s what the 16-year-old Louisburg High School junior made about two months ago that has him most excited these days. Not because it was so challenging, but because it’s already changing the life of a family friend’s 9-year-old son who was born without fingers on one hand.

Using a 3-D printer at the Johnson County Library, Wilde made a prosthetic hand that opens and closes and can even hold a pencil.

Just ask young Matthew how he feels about Wilde.

“He’s awesome,” the boy said, thrusting his mechanical hand high above his head.

The third-grader was born with only a thumb and a few partial digits on his right hand. He can lift stuff with it, balance a book on it, even tie his own shoes. But, Matthew said, “I was bored with that. I wanted to do more.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/31/4790811/kansas-teen-uses-3-d-printer-to.html#storylink=cpy 

Last year, he built a computer, pretty much from scratch.

But it’s what the 16-year-old Louisburg High School junior made about two months ago that has him most excited these days. Not because it was so challenging, but because it’s already changing the life of a family friend’s 9-year-old son who was born without fingers on one hand.

Using a 3-D printer at the Johnson County Library, Wilde made a prosthetic hand that opens and closes and can even hold a pencil.

Just ask young Matthew how he feels about Wilde.

“He’s awesome,” the boy said, thrusting his mechanical hand high above his head.

The third-grader was born with only a thumb and a few partial digits on his right hand. He can lift stuff with it, balance a book on it, even tie his own shoes. But, Matthew said, “I was bored with that. I wanted to do more.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/31/4790811/kansas-teen-uses-3-d-printer-to.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/31/4790811/kansas-teen-uses-3-d-printer-to.html#storylink=cpy

Turn Your Smartphone Into the Ultimate Fitness Tracker

Sure, you can shell out between $100-150 for standalone fitness trackers like the FitBit Flex andJawbone Up24. But chances are, you already carry around an even more powerful tracker: your smartphone. These sensor-packed rectangles may be bigger than your average wrist-worn alternative, but they have all the same capabilities (many have far more). All you need are the right apps to unlock your phone’s fitness-tracking potential.

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LIFE More: Fitness Exercise Tech Accessories Features 7 Awesome Fitness Gadgets To Get You Moving This Year

Getting fit is one of the most common New Year's resolutions, but the hardest part is getting started.

That's where tech-savvy fitness gadgets can help. Whether it's a portable GPS that helps you train or a wristband that keeps you on track, these new devices will make getting active and shedding pounds in 2014 that much easier.

Keep reading to see seven new gadgets that will up your fitness regimen.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/best-new-fitness-gadgets-2014-1#ixzz2reB8zaoC

Watch What You Eat, Using Your Phone as a Guide

I have always been skinny, but I do need to watch what I eat. So I count my calories — with the help of smartphone and tablet apps.

One of the best is Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal. Free on iOS and Android, it’s full of features for tracking food intake and exercise.

The app asks basic questions about height, weight, age, exercise levels and target weight, and uses this data to calculate a sensible daily calorie intake. You are supposed to enter the calorie values of everything you eat; the app then helps you avoid overshooting your daily allowance.

The app has a bar code scanner so it can look up most nutritional information directly from food packaging. This worked surprisingly well for me, getting the right information for everything from Heinz tomato soup to a Portuguese variant of the French cheese La Vache Qui Rit. All you have to do is enter how much you have eaten of a particular food to help the calorie calculation.

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Eyetracking Study Reveals What People Actually Look At When Shopping Online

When you pull up a website, what's the first thing you look at? The stock photo model splashed across the page? The large company logo at the top? The search bar?

EyeQuant, a German artificial intelligence software company that offers predictive eye-tracking for websites, is in the business of figuring out exactly what people will look at when the page loads. Results from the company's most recent study suggests that some of the conventional wisdom in web design, like that our attention is drawn to faces, might not always be correct.

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App Turns Smartphone Into Virtual Cane for the Blind

A smartphone app inspired by Greek mythology has the potential to help the blind navigate indoors where GPS is unavailable.
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New High Speed Eye Scanner Helps Identify Retinal Diseases

The device performs high-speed optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging using an infrared light source and tiny 2D mirror, creating a high-resolution 3D image of the retina. The system also automatically corrects for eye movement, effectively freezing the eye during the scan for a focused, streak-free result. Thought the essential technology inside the scanner has existed for years, and table-top systems have allowed diagnosis of retinal diseases by specialists, the new scanner may allow for population-wide screening of eye diseases.
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24 Invaluable Skills To Learn For Free Online This Year

Here’s an easy resolution: This stuff is all free as long as you have access to a computer, and the skills you learn will be invaluable in your career, and/or life in general.
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What Happens in an Internet Minute [infographic]

The world today is traveling faster and faster. Being on the internet for one minute is a very long time, let alone 5 minutes. Imagine if it took 5 minutes for a webpage to load, that sounds crazy! Today’s infographic gives us a look into how much work can be done in just a minute on the internet.
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Nothing Focuses The Mind Like The Ultimate Deadline: Death

Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock.

The seconds left in 2013 are slipping away. And you know what else is slipping away? The seconds left in your life.

Luckily for you, there's a new product called Tikker, a wristwatch that counts down your life, so you can watch on a large, dot-matrix display as the seconds you have left on Earth disappear down a black hole.

Your estimated time of death is, of course, just that — an estimate. Tikker uses an algorithm like the one used by the federal government to figure a person's life expectancy. But the effect is chilling, a sort of incessant grim reaper reminding you that time is running out.

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Smart Glasses Reveal What It's Like to Have Superpowers

Atheer's video suggested the potential in a future of wearable technology and 3D smart glasses. Watch it above; we dare you not to get excited.

"The experiences shown in the video from the user’s point of view can be available in 1-2 years," Atheer CEO Soulaiman Itani told Mashable. "Every functionality shown has been prototyped in a minimalistic way, but more with the core technology. Minimizing the hardware to be as small as in the video will probably take closer to eight years."

Wireless Speakers Let Music Roam Free

The simplicity and reduced size of many of the new wireless speakers make sense to me. They are easy to move physically and boss around mechanically, usually with simple controls on a smartphone. I like the idea of shifting my speakers to another place or banishing them from my sight, when I want to. With wireless speakers, especially smaller ones, this is reasonable.

Multiroom wireless systems, with speakers placed in as many rooms as you like, bring on different concerns. Until recently, I saw only three uses for them. One was to become a crisper family autocrat. (We will now all, in different rooms, listen to my No. 1 record of the year.) Another was to help with hearing podcasts, so you don’t forget where you are in someone’s run-on sentence while you move from the living room to the kitchen. And the third was to help you imagine that you live in a department store, where your ambulatory shopping experience is made more elegant by an unbroken soundtrack.

But my family and I just moved, and I’ve been rethinking the audio question down to the root. Maybe there’s more to it than I thought.

My rethinking really started when I got my hands on the wireless Sonos speakers. The company’s speakers have been justifiably popular since 2009, when it introduced what is now called the Play:5 speaker: $400 and roughly 8 inches by 14 inches, a rectangle that sits on its long end.

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DEVICE USES IPHONE CAMERA TO TEST CHOLESTERO

An iPhone app and an accessory that looks like a smartphone credit card reader can test your cholesterol in about a minute.

The Smartphone Cholesterol Application for Rapid Diagnostics, or “smartCARD,” uses the smartphone’s camera to read your cholesterol level.

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