Bioengr

21/05/2022

The Future of Hospital Infrastructure is going to change.

credit:

21/08/2020

Smart sensors embeded in a workhorse coronary wire to better treat cardiac patients, and all in a Philips device only 14/1000 inch in diameter!

23/07/2020

Future of colonoscopy CAD Eye (artificial intelligence) meets G EYE (balloon assisted colonoscopy for improved mucosa exposure). Polyps are detected and proper diagnosis of serrated adenoma with dysplasia and hyperplastic changes is made.

copied: Prof.Dr. Ralf Kiesslich

16/07/2020

Guess what?

13/07/2020

Bioartificial livers are an attractive option as a bridge to transplant or to promote liver regeneration in cases of acute liver failure.

Here, Li et al. tested an extracorporeal bioartificial liver system composed of human liver progenitor-like cells cultured on macroporous scaffolds in a bioreactor that provides alternating air-liquid exposure.

Three hours of treatment improved survival, reducing inflammation and promoting native liver regeneration in pigs with drug-induced acute liver failure. Results suggest extracorporeal cell-based bioartificial livers may be a promising treatment for acute liver failure.

26/06/2020

THE BIOVYZR IS A POWERED AIR PURIFYING RESPIRATOR (PAPR) FOR EVERYDAY PROTECTION AGAINST PATHOGENS.

ITS PROPRIETARY DESIGN PROVIDES 360 DEGREES OF PROTECTION AND SHIELDS YOU ON ALL SIDES.

BREATHE EASY WITH A PERSONAL AIR FILTRATION SYSTEM THAT REMOVES 95% OF PARTICULATE MATTER

03/06/2020

A team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota has 3D printed lifelike artificial organ models that mimic the exact anatomical structure, mechanical properties, and look and feel of real organs.

courtesy: UMN College of Science & Engineering

30/05/2020

A controllable prosthetic hand using electromyography to detect the gestures and muscle activities. The project is aimed to be affordable, upgradable, repairable, and flexible. To make it affordable, it consists of 3D printed parts for structure and only common electronic parts are being used. The hand is controlled through EMG signals read by muscle activities on upper forearm. These EMG signals are then transmitted via Bluetooth to Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi then processes these signals and move servo motors accordingly. The project is still in early state with many areas could be improved.

courtesy: Kenneth V.

01/05/2020

A realtime heart valve simulation analysis generated by SimCenter Star

credit: Siemens, star-ccm

14/04/2020

Digital Aerolus has developed an indoor drone with UVC light technology that can be used to disinfect and combat COVID-19.

Digital Aerolus developed the Aertos 120-UVC to disinfect spaces that are high risk for exposure to COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2).

The Aertos 120-UVC is the first stable indoor drone with C-band ultraviolet (UVC) lights. When administered properly, UVC has over a 99% disinfection rate. The new disinfection drone will be available in volume in May.

source: digitalaerolus

08/04/2020

A neurosurgeon and a robotics engineer from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) have given people who need ventilator support, for different reasons, hope and respite from hefty bills. They have developed an advanced portable ventilator which is equipped with a tablet and will cost ten to twenty times lower than those available in the market.

According to a report in the Indian Express, AIIMS is the first medical institute in the national capital to successfully use it on patients. “This ventilator’s home version will cost patients around Rs 35,000 as they don’t need a tablet. They can connect it on their android phones.

credit: feonline, quintfit

02/04/2020

The ApolloBVM is an automated bag valve mask (BVM) device utilizing off-the-shelf components to provide safe and continuous hospital-grade mechanical ventilation for COVID-19 patients on an open-source basis.

The ApolloBVM is a controllable, automated add-on solution to the existing and widely available Bag Valve Mask. The device compresses the BVM with a mechanical system that is able to provide consistent and accurate ventilation with positive-pressure. This solution exists within the top range of high-acuity limited-operability (HALO) ventilator solutions with an a priori design to produce volume and pressure cycled ventilation that includes positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) and enriched oxygen sources.

Controls of the ApolloBVM are familiar and clinician-designed with adult, child, and pediatric settings. They allow for tailored ventilation, adjustable I:E ratios, and variable positive pressure. Please note: This design took inspiration from the 2018-2019 Rice University Senior Design Project from Team Take A Breather.

31/03/2020

Virgin Orbit has developed a new mass-producible bridge ventilator to help in the fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The Virgin Orbit team has been consulting with the Bridge Ventilator Consortium (BVC), led by the University of California Irvine (UCI) and the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), a group formed to spawn and nurture efforts to build producible, simple ventilators to aid in the current COVID-19 crisis. Pending clearance by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Virgin Orbit aims to commence production at its Long Beach manufacturing facility in early April, sprinting to deliver units into the hands of first responders and healthcare professionals as soon as possible.

As the COVID-19 crisis worsens and the paucity of medical equipment becomes more and more clear, the Virgin Orbit team is strongly motivated to do all that we can to help. On a normal day, we’re building rockets and other equipment for space launch; we are not medical doctors nor are we usually manufacturers of medical devices. But we do have a team of incredibly innovative and agile thinkers — experts in designing, fabricating, programming, testing — who are eager to lend a hand.

credit: virgin orbit

31/03/2020

Virgin Orbit has developed a new mass-producible bridge ventilator to help in the fight against the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The Virgin Orbit team has been consulting with the Bridge Ventilator Consortium (BVC), led by the University of California Irvine (UCI) and the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), a group formed to spawn and nurture efforts to build producible, simple ventilators to aid in the current COVID-19 crisis. Pending clearance by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Virgin Orbit aims to commence production at its Long Beach manufacturing facility in early April, sprinting to deliver units into the hands of first responders and healthcare professionals as soon as possible.

As the COVID-19 crisis worsens and the paucity of medical equipment becomes more and more clear, the Virgin Orbit team is strongly motivated to do all that we can to help. On a normal day, we’re building rockets and other equipment for space launch; we are not medical doctors nor are we usually manufacturers of medical devices. But we do have a team of incredibly innovative and agile thinkers — experts in designing, fabricating, programming, testing — who are eager to lend a hand.

source: virgin orbit

27/03/2020

Engineers, anaesthetists and surgeons from the University of Oxford and King’s College London are building and testing prototypes that can be manufactured using techniques and tools available in well-equipped university and small and medium enterprise (SME) workshops.

The team, led by Oxford Professors Andrew Farmery, Mark Thompson and Alfonso Castrejon-Pita and King's College London’s Dr Federico Formenti, have been working to define novel mechanisms of operation that will meet the required specifications for safe and reliable function. The design aims to exploit off-the-shelf components and equipment.

The researchers are working in response to UK government calls to increase the country’s ventilator manufacturing capacity due to COVID-19. Demonstrating safety and reliability and achieving regulatory approval of the opensource design will be necessary, and once this has been achieved, the approach could unlock potential for a new kind of distributed manufacturing effort.

credit: ox.ac.uk

24/03/2020

The device - called the e-glove - features several thin, flexible multimodal sensors linked to miniaturized silicon microchips that process the biofeedback. An affordable substrate - nitrile rubber gloves - house the sensor array and supporting tech.

The e-glove comes in a variety of skin tones and fits over almost any prosthetic hand on the market. Lee and his research team can even mold individual models to match the contours of a person's hands, which goes a long way in restoring confidence in social interactions

"We've added an encapsulation on top that makes it look like a real hand," says Min Ku Kim, a biomedical engineering doctoral student working with Lee. "We borrowed some tricks from the special effects department and moviemaking, so we can actually take a mold of a real hand and then encapsulate the outer surface of the glove with this function."

Lee points out that with 3 million individuals in the US using some sort of prosthetic hand, the need for improvement is considerable. That has prompted a bevy of research geared towards designing the next-generation of prosthesis. While Lee and his team are very much working in that lane, the point of differentiation lies in the affordable and adaptable nature of their design.

"This is not just developing new technology, I'm trying to employ technology to tackle the actual practical problems existing there," says Lee. "I want to employ engineering techniques, materials and technologies to develop something useful and practical devices that can be implemented into the clinical settings. I mean, I'm talking about one or two years later, I'm not talking about ten to twenty years. I'm a biomedical engineer so I want to do somewhere practical engineering things to help the people so in need."

credit: btn.com

22/03/2020

🔷Wireless, Skin-mounted Sensors Monitor Babies, Pregnant Women in the Developing World🔷

Every year, 15 million babies are born too early, with 1 million never making it to their next birthday. And in low-resource settings, the outlook is even more dire. Half of babies born at 32 weeks or earlier will die; whereas in high-resource settings, almost all of these babies survive.

To help bridge this gap, an interdisciplinary team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new wireless, battery-charged, affordable monitoring system for newborn babies that can easily be implemented to provide clinical-grade care in nearly any setting.

The new devices also exceed the capabilities of existing, wired monitoring technologies to provide information beyond traditional vital signs, including crying, movement, body orientation, and heart sounds. These soft, flexible sensors also are far gentler on newborns’ fragile skin, and their wireless capabilities allow for more skin-to-skin contact with parents.

Not only can this technology lower risks by monitoring premature babies, it can also monitor pregnant women during labor to ensure a healthy and safe delivery and reduce risks of maternal mortality. By closely monitoring the most vulnerable patients, physicians can be alerted to intervene before the infant or mother become seriously ill.

credit: northwestern university

21/02/2020

30/01/2020

In certain mammals, the ability to lower body temperature via perspiration and evaporative cooling permits greater endurance during strenuous activity. This evolutionary adaptation, coupled with relative hairlessness, likely enabled early humans to excel as “persistence hunters,” capable of exhausting prey over a prolonged chase despite a comparatively slower top speed . Sweating takes advantage of water’s large enthalpy of vaporization and perspiration rates (in humans) of up to 3.5 liters hour−1 correspond to roughly 2.4 kW of cooling capacity

In engineered systems, the conversion of stored energy into useful work is never fully efficient, and heat is dissipated into the system. Adverse effects resulting from excess heat are numerous and include thermal expansion, stresses from temperature gradients, or a change in electron mobility in circuitry. Therefore, stable device performance requires proper thermal management, like the incorporation of sinks that absorb and dissipate heat through conduction, convection, and radiation. The practical implications of thermoregulation restrict available designs and limit the maximum achievable power densities of components.

The emerging field of soft robotics offers animal-like motions via continuum actuation and conformal interactions with the environment via compliant materials.

20/01/2020

With only one button to press, results right on the screen, and automatic Wi-Fi sync, BPM Connect is the simplest way to accurately measure your blood pressure and monitor it over time. Plus, the flexible cuff makes packing and traveling a breeze.

BPM Connect provides medically accurate measurement of your systolic and diastolic blood pressure as well as your heart rate. By taking your blood pressure at home with BPM Connect, you may also be able to avoid white-coat syndrome, detect masked hypertension, and manage nocturnal hypertension.

High blood pressure, the leading cause of heart disease and stroke, may not show symptoms. The American Heart Association recommends home blood pressure monitoring to improve control rates and provide better prognostic indicators.

28/12/2019

Georgia A. Malandraki, an associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences in Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, and Chi Hwan Lee, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering in Purdue’s College of Engineering, founded Curasis LLC and serve as an acting chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively. They started the company to commercialize their wearable technology and move it as quickly as possible to clinics and people with swallowing difficulties.

“We want to provide a reliable, patient-friendly and affordable way to treat the millions of people with swallowing disorders,” Malandraki said. “Many devices to help these people are expensive, not able to be taken home and not accessible in many rural areas.”

The researchers created a skin-mountable sensor sticker that attaches firmly to the neck area and is connected with small cables to a wireless transmitter unit.

The skin-mountable sensor sticker measures and records muscle activity and movement associated with swallowing. The information is then sent wirelessly by a separate unit clipped on the wearer’s shirt to software that stores it for later analysis by a doctor.

Successful completion of a swallow requires the precise coordination of more than 30 pairs of muscles of the head and neck, six pairs of cranial nerves, and complex circuitry in the brainstem and several brain areas. Any disruption in these pathways can result in severe swallowing disorders. More than 9 million adults and more than 500,000 children experience severe swallowing disorders each year in the U.S.

“Our device is unique in that we specifically created it to work well with the small and intricate muscles associated with swallowing events,” Lee said. “The sensor sticker is stretchable and flexible to work well with the skin and curvilinear head and neck shape, while the connected unit has electronic chips and more rigid components.”

The sensor stickers are disposable, designed with inexpensive components and meant to be used about 10 times before they are thrown away.

credit:purdue.edu @ Purdue University College of Health and Human Sciences

26/12/2019

What Are Wearables?

Werables are electronic technology or devices incorporated into items that can be comfortably worn on a body. These wearable devices are used for tracking information on real time basis. They have motion sensors that take the snapshot of your day to day activity and sync them with mobile devices or laptop computers. After the invention of smartphones, wearable electronics are the next big innovation in the world of technology.

Even before the wearable technology entered the consumer market, these wearable devices were used in the field of military technology. In fact, these devices were an integral part of the medical and healthcare sector in the military forces. Devices like ‘Wearable Motherboards’ or ‘Smart Shirts’ used to monitor the health and wellbeing of the patients and send back information to the hub station in real time.

Different types of Wearables

• Smart Watches: A watch that does more than just telling time. It provides users notifications on their calls, messages, emails, social media updates, etc.

• Fitness Tracker: Helps keep a track of the number of steps the user walks each day and continuously monitors the heart rate. Using this information, the devices is able to calculate and report accurate data on calorie burn and exercise done by the user.

• Head Mounted Display: Takes you to a different world of virtual reality. It provides virtual information directly to your eyes.

• Sports watches: The wearable devices is especially built for sports personnel who love running, cycling, swimming etc. These devices come with GPS tracker and records information on the user’s pace, heart rate etc.

• Smart jewellery: Smartwatches are designed as jewelries specially targeting women. These jewelries notify the users of their text messages, calls or emails when their phone is out of reach.

• Smart Clothing: The smart electronic devices are incorporated into the Wearable Clothing to give an interesting and fashionable look.

• Implantable: These wearable electronics are surgically implanted under the skin. These are usually used for medical reasons like tracking contraception’s, insulin levels

source: /happiestminds/

09/12/2019

Recent advances in smart contact lenses are essential to the realization of medical applications and vision imaging for augmented reality through wireless communication systems. However, previous research on smart contact lenses has been driven by a wired system or wireless power transfer with temporal and spatial restrictions, which can limit their continuous use and require energy storage devices. Also, the rigidity, heat, and large sizes of conventional batteries are not suitable for the soft, smart contact lens. Here, we describe a human pilot trial of a soft, smart contact lens with a wirelessly rechargeable, solid-state supercapacitor for continuous operation. After printing the supercapacitor, all device components (antenna, rectifier, and light-emitting diode) are fully integrated with stretchable structures for this soft lens without obstructing vision. The good reliability against thermal and electromagnetic radiations and the results of the in vivo tests provide the substantial promise of future smart contact lenses.

source:sciencemag

04/12/2019

Scientists have made artificial nerve cells, paving the way for new ways to repair the human body.

The tiny "brain chips" behave like the real thing and could one day be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer's.

A team from the University of Bath used a combination of maths, computation and chip design to come up with a way to replicate in circuit form what nerve cells (neurons) do naturally.

Neurons carry signals to and from the brain and the rest of the body.

Scientists are interested in replicating them, because of the potential that offers in treating diseases such as Alzheimer's, where neurons degenerate or die.

Prof Alain Nogaret, from Bath's department of physics, said the novelty of their research was to transfer the electrical properties of brain cells on to synthetic circuits made from silicon.

"Until now, neurons have been like black boxes, but we have managed to open the black box and peer inside," he said. "Our work is paradigm-changing because it provides a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail."

Making artificial neurons that respond to electrical signals from the nervous system has been a long-time goal in medicine. Challenges included designing the circuits and finding the parameters that make the circuits behave like real neurons.

"We have managed to extract these parameters for biological neurons and plug these parameters into the synthetic circuits we have made," said Prof Nogaret.

The researchers replicated two types of neurones, including cells from the hippocampus, an area of the brain that plays a major role in memory, and brain cells involved in the control of breathing.

The work opens up a range of possibilities in repairing the neuron that have been lost to degenerative disease, including medical implants to treat conditions such as heart failure and Alzheimer's

20/10/2019

A “Charlotte Box:” an incubator for premature or sick babies to increase their chances of survival. This design was named after Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, London.

According to the Science Museum: “It was originally a way to give oxygen to sick babies. However, it was soon used in new special care baby units to transform cots into simple incubators. The outlook for premature babies during the first half of the 20th century was very poor. Survivors often experienced brain damage and intellectual and physical disabilities. New techniques and technologies after the Second World War increased survival rates. These included mechanical ventilation to help newborns breathe, and feeding newborns via tubes directly into their blood vessels. However, the rudimentary heating system in the ‘Charlotte box’ comprised a hot water bottle and thermometer inside the Perspex box. Research and development through the decades saw incubators improve to be able to monitor blood pressure, oxygen levels and lung function.”

Image Source: Wellcome Library/Science Museum

05/10/2019

Equine Imagine Taken At Cornell Radiology Lab

The Imaging Service at the Cornell University Hospital for Animals maintains the most current technology and employs an experienced staff to obtain medical images and diagnose routine and complex diseases in horses, camelids, and farm animals. Their licensed technicians, board-certified radiologists and radiology residents-in-training perform and interpret imaging examinations on a wide range of species.

Their service uses advanced imaging equipment including CT, MRI, digital radiography, fluoroscopy, ultrasound and nuclear medicine. They provide image interpretation for all hospitalized animals and consultations to veterinarians who submit images by mail or electronically. Outpatient ultrasound (and some limited CT/MRI) examinations are also available. Also they work with other veterinarians at the Hospital to reduce uncertainty about diagnosis, extent of disease and disease progression.

@ Cornell University

26/09/2019

"A GIRL WAS AFRAID OF IVS,
SO SHE INVENTED A TEDDY BEAR TO DISGUISE THEM"

31/08/2019

Biobeat developed cutting-edge wearable monitors that allow remote, non-invasive and medical grade accurate monitoring of numerous vital signs, as well as other significant physiological parameters.

24/08/2019

The robotic equivalent of a muscle that can move is called an actuator. The actuator expands, contracts or rotates like muscle fibers using a stimulus such as electricity. Engineers around the world are striving to develop more dynamic actuators that respond quickly, can bend without breaking, and are very durable. Soft, robotic muscles could have a wide variety of applications, from wearable electronics to advanced prosthetics.

The team from KAIST's Creative Research Initiative Center for Functionally Antagonistic Nano-Engineering developed a very thin, responsive, flexible and durable artificial muscle. The actuator looks like a skinny strip of paper about an inch long. They used a particular type of material called MXene, which is class of compounds that have layers only a few atoms thick.

Their chosen MXene material (T3C2Tx) is made of thin layers of titanium and carbon compounds. It was not flexible by itself; sheets of material would flake off the actuator when bent in a loop. That changed when the MXene was "ionically cross-linked" -- connected through an ionic bond -- to a synthetic polymer. The combination of materials made the actuator flexible, while still maintaining strength and conductivity, which is critical for movements driven by electricity.

Their particular combination performed better than others reported. Their actuator responded very quickly to low voltage, and lasted for more than five hours moving continuously.

To prove the tiny robotic muscle works, the team incorporated the actuator into wearable art: an origami-inspired brooch mimics how a narcissus flower unfolds its petals when a small amount of electricity is applied. They also designed robotic butterflies that move their wings up and down, and made the leaves of a tree sculpture flutter.

"Wearable robotics and kinetic art demonstrate how robotic muscles can have fun and beautiful applications," said Il-Kwon Oh, lead paper author and professor of mechanical engineering. "It also shows the enormous potential for small, artificial muscles for a variety of uses, such as haptic feedback systems and active biomedical devices."

credit:sciencedaily

12/08/2019

Filtering and treating water, both for human consumption and to clean industrial and municipal wastewater, accounts for about 13 percent of all electricity consumed in the U.S. and releases about 290 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year — roughly equivalent to the combined weight of every human on earth.

One of the most common methods of processing water is passing it through a membrane with pores that are sized to filter out particles that are larger than water molecules. However, these membranes are susceptible to “fouling” — clogging by the very materials they are designed to filter out — necessitating more electricity to force the water through a partially clogged membrane and frequent membrane replacement, both of which increase water-treatment costs.

New research from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and collaborators at Northeastern University and the University of Waterloo demonstrates that the Wyss’ liquid-gated membranes (LGMs) filter nanoclay particles out of water with twofold higher efficiency and nearly threefold longer time to foul, and reduce the pressure required for filtration over conventional membranes. It’s a solution that could reduce the cost and electricity consumption of high-impact industrial processes such as oil and gas drilling. The study is reported in APL Materials.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that LGMs can achieve sustained filtration in settings similar to those found in heavy industry, and it provides insight into how LGMs resist different types of fouling, which could lead to their use in a variety of water-processing settings,” said first author Jack Alvarenga, a research scientist at the Wyss Institute.

credit:scitechdaily

01/08/2019

Engineers have now created unique nanoparticles that redirect immune cells away from the spinal cord, promoting regeneration that helped restore spinal cord function in mice. The study was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering(NIBIB).

The spinal cord, similar to the brain, has a blood-brain barrier that guards the fragile nerves against possible damage from numerous assaults; for example, it blocks immune cells from migrating to the site of injury to clean up debris.

This blood-brain barrier gets damaged when a traumatic injury occurs in the spinal cord, and the quick influx of immune cells produces an environment that tries to rapidly shore-up the injury but, at the same time, blocks regenerative processes that can effectively reconstruct and reconnect fragile damaged nerves.

Now, a method has been developed by NIBIB-grantee Lonnie Shea, PhD, the Steven A Goldstein Collegiate Professor, Biomedical engineering, and his coworkers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to overcome this problem.

This technique involves redirecting several immune cells away from the site of injury and simultaneously inducing those cells that do reach the SCI to change to an anti-inflammatory profile. This creates factors that promote a regenerative healing process, which can help restore function.

The novel method has been reported in the July edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

credit: azonano.com

26/07/2019

Scientist grow steak in Lab