Monthly Archives: April 2012

The world’s safest earphones

Audiologist Matt Murphy designed EarHero, a special pair of earphones designed to let you hear both your music and the sound of street traffic, as a means to elevate the dangers of wearing headphones whilst traversing city streets. A far safer alternative than other in ear options.

EarHeros leave your ear canal open allowing you to continue to hear your surroundings while still listening to music. Hear people speak, hear cars, hear potential dangers. Whether you are hitting the slopes, out for a long ride or going for a run earHerosport just made your active lifestyle more safe.
EarHero.

The Wireless Revolution Hits Medicine

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Eric Topol talks about the upheaval that’s coming as the digitization of health care meets the smartphone.

We’re all essentially surgically connected to our smartphones, and we’re still in the early stages of realizing their medical potential. But they should be a real threat to the medical profession.
You can get an add-on to a smartphone which does eye refraction and then texts [the prescription] to get your glasses made. If you’re an optometrist, you might be worried about that. Or you can get your skin lesion scanned and get a text back quickly that there’s nothing to worry about. If you’re a dermatologist, that’s a big part of your practice. You will be able to take a DNA sequence on a USB port and pop it into your smartphone and get data out of it. It just goes on and on.

Let’s say you want to prevent a child from ever having an asthma attack. You would know genomically from their DNA sequence that they’re predisposed to asthma. Then you would apply a biosensor that could be worn to detect the early signs of an asthma attack and send data to the doctor through a smartphone before it occurred. Then medications could be used to ward off an asthma attack. Using the DNA sequence, the drugs would be matched up to the child’s biologic basis for asthma, predicting responsiveness and the absence of significant side effects.

The Wireless Revolution Hits Medicine

Microsoft Research Cliplets

A still photograph is a limited format for capturing moments that span an interval of time. Video is the traditional method for recording durations of time, but the subjective “moment” that one desires to capture is often lost in the chaos of shaky camerawork, irrelevant background clutter, and noise that dominates most casually recorded video clips. This work provides a creative lens used to focus on important aspects of a moment by performing spatiotemporal compositing and editing on video-clip input. This is an interactive app that uses semi-automated methods to give users the power to create “cliplets”–a type of imagery that sits between stills and video from handheld videos.

Though most of the examples I have seen don’t match the quality shown in the video above, you can get a taste of this fun with apps on the iPhone like Cinemagram.

Canadians sent 78 billion text messages in 2011

iphone girl
The Canadian Press reports on survey results stating that the number of personal text messages sent every year has nearly quadrupled since 2008 and is up nearly 20 times over 2006’s total of 4.3 billion.

Canadians sent an average of almost 2,500 SMS messages every second last year, for a total of about 78 billion.
That figure was up almost 40 per cent from 2010, when the texting tally hit 56.4 billion messages.
The numbers were compiled by the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, which also said the number of sent MMS messages — which include pictures, video or audio — hit 326.7 million last year.
Canadians also sent and received 2.8 billion short code text messages in 2011, which are typically used for commercial and charity purposes.

Canadians sent 78 billion text messages in 2011

Tourniquet iPad Sleeve

Tourniquet iPad Sleeve
Tourniquet iPad Sleeve
Another minimalist leather sleeve for your iPad, with or without the smart cover. Made in the USA, the Tourniquet is a single thick cut of matte finish, black Horween Leather. Each sleeve features a laser etched logo with production number. No two pieces are alike, life marks and other natural imperfections of the leather will occur. Should only get better with age and with it’s generic form be useful for other ‘uses’ as well. On my wish list.
Tourniquet iPad Sleeve