From Your Heart to Your iPhone

From Your Heart to Your iPhone

  10:11:00 AM    Science Lover

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A new app gets data from an implanted device and can share it with the patient, doctors, and family.

A smart-phone app under development for heart-failure patients allows them to keep track of the pressure inside their heart as measured by an implanted sensor. That data could help patients adjust their medication to maintain a healthy pressure, much as diabetics do with insulin and blood sugar readings.

Called Pam+ (for "patient advisory module"), the app is being developed by researchers at the University of Southern California in collaboration with medical device maker St. Jude Medical. The researchers hope it will help patients better manage their health and reduce hospitalizations, which are responsible for much of the $40 million in health-care costs linked to heart failure.

In congestive heart failure, pressure builds up in the circulatory system and the heart fails to pump blood adequately to the rest of the body. Fluid pressure changes by the day, and monitoring those fluctuations continuously is essential to treating heart failure effectively. A number of implanted devices are now under development to monitor this pressure, giving patients and doctors real time data.

The PAM+ app works in conjunction with an external device—developed by St. Jude and currently in clinical tests—that is placed over the heart, where it charges the implanted sensor and downloads data from it.

The data is forwarded to a server at St. Jude that analyzes it and returns, via the app, the latest readings and information about ongoing trends. A patient who has regularly monitored his or her heart pressure over a week will see a graph of pressure readings along with the message "Your heart thanks you." Users can easily share their data with their health-care team and family.



"We want patients to be able to access data but also to be rewarded and encouraged on a daily basis, so they don't feel like their whole life is a diet," says Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist and director of the Center for Body Computing at USC, who helped develop the device.

Previous research conducted by Saxon showed that remote monitoring can improve the health of heart-failure patients and lower health-care costs. She unveiled a prototype of the app at the Body Computing conference in Los Angeles today.

Users get points for monitoring their pressure—points that might eventually be tied to iTunes or Amazon credit. "Even a traditional payer would love to reward this type of behavior," says Saxon.

She believes an app like this can also change the nature of doctors' visits. Rather than a physician giving a patient the latest test results, taken at a few points in time, the patient can show the doctor measurements of heart pressure over weeks and months, and together they can discuss the trends these reveal.

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Bringing a Whole New Meaning to 'High-Speed Internet'

Bringing a Whole New Meaning to 'High-Speed Internet'

  8:11:00 PM    Science Lover

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Researchers push a staggering 100 terabits of data per second through an optical fiber.

Faster broadband needed (Image: Ray Tang/Rex Features)

Talk about fast. Researchers have recently reported sending over 100 terabits of information per second through an optical fiber, New Scientist recently reported. That's a staggering amount of data--it would take three months' worth of HD video footage to use so much space.

The findings were revealed at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference, held in Los Angeles recently. First, an NEC Laboratories researcher (in Princeton, NJ) named Dayou Qian shared how he managed to push 101.7 terabits of data per second along 103 miles of fiber. The trick involved using pulses from 370 different lasers to multiply the amount of information that could be encoded at once. The light pulses were further varied to encode more information by using different polarities, phases, and amplitudes of light waves, according to reports.

Breakthroughs often occur in pairs (otherwise we wouldn't have so many patent disputes). Not to be outdone, a researcher at the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Jan Sakaguchi, had an even more impressive figure to share. Sakaguchi managed to squeeze 109 terabits per second through a fiber. His technique was different, and a little more intuitive--he simply used seven light-guiding cores in his fiber, rather than the more traditional single core. "We introduced a new dimension, spatial multiplication, to increasing transmission capacity," as he put it to New Scientist.



Does this mean your page-loading woes are forever dissipated? According to the report, the finding has little immediate bearing on your day-to-day Internet usage. The numbers involved here are so large, that they matter less to the individual consumer than they do to major data centers like those fueling giants like Google and Facebook (though presumably, any time saved there might ultimately benefit you in one way or another). Even looking on an infrastructural level, the numbers involved simply dwarf current commercial need. 100 terabits per second? One of today's most heavily trafficked broadband channels, that between New York and DC, only needs to send over a handful of terabits per second--not anywhere near 100 of them. Still, the rise of video-streaming and other data intensive projects means it can't hurt to have this tech in our back pocket, by any means. "Traffic has been growing about 50% per year for the last few years," Tim Strong of Telegeography Research told New Scientist.

As more and more cities come online in serious, data-guzzling ways--as we enter what's been termed the Terabit Age--it certainly won't hurt to have hit what one NEC researcher dubbed this "critical milestone in fiber capacity."

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