SMART PHONE - THE TOBACCO SCREENER

Smart phones and tablets may hold the key to screen patients for tobacco use and advise smokers on how to quit. Using mobile phones loaded with tobacco screening guidelines prompted nurses to ask patients about their smoking habits in 84 percent of clinic visits and to offer cessation counseling to 99 percent of smokers expressed a willingness to kick the habit.

IN PRACTICE:

Even though tobacco use is the leading cause of death in the U.S., clinicians don’t ask about smoking during patient exams instead mobile phones are loaded with tobacco screening guidelines.

 These findings suggest that mobile applications can play a significant role in curbing tobacco use. U.S. Smokers are advised on how to quit less than 20 percent of the time and are screened for tobacco use in about 60 percent of office visits, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

PERFECT APPLICATION:

 These findings are a win in the ongoing battle against tobacco use, and they also point to a broader benefit of mobile applications in getting more clinicians to follow evidence-based practice guidelines.

SCREENING:

Step 1: The study evaluated tobacco screening rates for more than 14,000 visits at clinics in New York City.

Step 2: Clinic patients were treated by 185 registered nurses enrolled in advanced practice degree programs at Columbia Nursing.

Step 3: Overall screening and counseling rates were increased by use of the mobile tools.

          The technology can serve to remove any unintended bias and clinicians might have understand about which patients are most likely to benefit from intervention.

GOAL ATTAINED:

 The study included only patients seen by nurses who had access to mobile health tools, the screening and counseling rates in the study are much higher than the baseline rates tracked by the CDC.

The mobile tools also helped clinicians exceed the targets for screening and counseling established by Healthy People 2020, a national road map for improving health and eliminating health disparities.

Tobacco-related objectives in Healthy People 2020 include

·        Counseling rates of about 21 percent

·        Screening rates of about 69 percent during office visits.

SMART PHONE BASED VOTING SYSTEM

A new study published in Human Factors examines how smart phone-based voting systems can be incorporated into the current large-scale election process.

PROBLEM WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING TECHNOLOGY:

Many U.S. counties have incorporated electronic voting technology, largely in response to well-publicized challenges related to older mechanical and punch-card models. Although these updated systems have solved some usability problems, they present a new set of issues for voters unfamiliar with the technology.

Current electronic voting systems have numerous issues -- from usability and accessibility to security to the fact that many of them are nearing the end of their life cycle.

DESIGN:

Researchers Bryan Campbell, Chad Tossell, Michael Byrne, and Philip Kortum designed a mobile voting system tested its usability against traditional voting platforms and optimizes it for use on a smart phone. They asked 84 participants with a diverse range of voting histories and educational backgrounds to engage in a series of mock elections using different voting methods. It is found that there are numerous potential advantages in using a smart phone-based system.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES:

Ø Nobody likes to wait in line at the polling place and so mobile voting offers the opportunity to cast votes when and where it is convenient for the voter.

Ø However, making this work as an anywhere, anytime system requires solving a substantial number of serious security and authentication problems that may not be solvable, and certainly not in the near term.

Ongoing research is needed to develop systems that allow voters to securely and anonymously submit their ballots.

California Law on Anti-Theft Switch for Smart phones Goes to Governor

The Street (Aug. 12, 2014) — A California law which will require smart phones to have a switch allowing users to render the device inoperable when stolen is in the final approval stage. The California Senate passed the so-called kill switch measure. The bill is now being sent to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature. According to the bill's author, theft of smart phones had been growing along its popularity, smart phone makers like Apple and Samsung will need to notify the users when the technology becomes available. It would also require wireless carriers to check user name and passwords associated with phones that were  deactivated before the phones can be used again.

SECURITY PROBLEM IN GOOGLE PLAY

Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into Google Play -- anyone can get a $25 account and upload whatever they want. “Very little is known about what's there at an aggregate level,” says Nieh, who is also a member of the University's Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering's Cybersecurity Center. Google Play has huge popularity and it is important to take a close look at Google Play content.

PLAYDRONE:

Nieh and Viennot's paper is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge Google Play marketplace. To do this, they developed PlayDrone, a tool to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources and uses various hacking techniques. PlayDrone scales by simply adding more servers and is fast enough to crawl Google Play on a daily basis,

-->   Downloading more than 1.1 million Android apps

-->    Decompiling over 880,000 free applications.

ANALYSIS:

Nieh and Viennot discovered all kinds of new information about the content in Google Play, including a critical security problem: developers often store their secret keys in their apps software, similar to usernames/passwords info, and these can be then used by anyone to maliciously steal user data or resources from service providers such as Amazon and Facebook. These vulnerabilities can affect users even if they are not actively running the Android apps. Nieh notes that even "Top Developers," designated by the Google Play team as the best developers on Google Play, included these vulnerabilities in their apps.

MEASURES ADOPTED:

All developers  have been working closely with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other service providers to identify and notify customers at risk, and make the Google Play store a safer place. Google is now using techniques to proactively scan apps to prevent these problems from happening again in the future.

FINDINGS:

¨     A quarter of all Google Play free apps are clones

¨     Very slow app purchases in Google Play  

¨     The worst rated apps had more than a million downloads more than good apps

MICRO WINDMILL – THE BATTERY CHARGER

Electrical engineers have developed an innovative solution to cell phone batteries constantly in need of recharging, a micro-windmill that generates wind energy and may become home energy generation.

INTERESTING DESIGN:

v The device that is about 1.8 mm at its widest point.

v A single grain of rice could hold about 10 of these tiny windmills.

v Hundreds of the windmills could be embedded in a sleeve for a cell phone.

Wind, created by waving the cell phone in air or holding it up to an open window on a windy day, would generate the electricity that could be collected by the cell phone's battery.

MATERIALS INVOLVED:

It involves a conventional wafer-scale semiconductor device layout so complex 3-D moveable mechanical structures can be self-assembled from two-dimensional metal pieces utilizing planar multilayer electroplating techniques that have been optimized by WinMEMS Technologies Co., The micro-windmills work well because the metal alloy is flexible. 

UT ARLINGTON – THE DESIGNER:

WinMEMS became interested in the micro-electro mechanical system research and started a relationship with UT Arlington. Company representatives visited with the UT Arlington team several times in 2013 to discuss collaboration.

An agreement has been established for UT Arlington to hold the intellectual properties while WinMEMS explores the commercialization opportunities. UT Arlington has applied for a provisional patent.

Currently, WinMEMS has been showcasing UT Arlington's works on its website and in public presentations, which include the

ü Micro-Windmills

ü Gears

ü Inductors

ü Pop-Up Switches

ü Grippers

All of those parts are as tiny as a fraction of the diameter of a human hair.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES:

The micro-windmills can be made in an array using the batch processes. The fabrication cost of making one device is the same as making hundreds or thousands on a single wafer, which enables for mass production of very inexpensive systems.

When the phone is out of battery power, all you need to do is to put on the sleeve, wave the phone in the air for a few minutes and you can use the phone again.

Also because of the small sizes, flat panels with thousand of windmills could be made and mounted on the walls of houses or building to harvest energy for lighting, security or environmental sensing and wireless communication.

EXPERIMENTAL DRUG TREATMENT FOR EBOLA

FEVER DETECTION:

On 28 September, 2014, the 38-year old doctor, who was in charge of an Ebola virus treatment unit in Lakka, Sierra Leone, developed a fever and diarrhea. He tested positive for the virus on the same day. The doctor was airlifted to Frankfurt University Hospital on the 5th day of his illness and admitted to a specialized isolation unit.

PROBLEMS THEREAFTER:

Within 72 hours of admission he developed signs

Ø Vascular leakage

Ø Severe multi-organ failure

·        Lungs

·        Kidneys

·        Gastrointestinal tract

ANTIBIOTIC:

He was placed on a ventilator and on kidney dialysis, and was given antibiotics together with a 3-day course of an experimental drug called FX06—a fibrin-derived peptide that has been shown to reduce vascular leakage and its complications in mice with Dengue hemorrhagic shock.

A marked improvement in vascular and respiratory function was seen under the combined measures of intensive care and drug treatment. After a 30-day observation period, no Ebola virus genetic material was detected in the patient's blood plasma. The patient was released from hospital and is now with his family.

"Even though the patient was critically ill, we were able to support him long enough for his body to start antibody production and for the virus to be cleared by his body's defenses," explains Dr Wolf.

FX06 should be evaluated in clinical trials.

ENERGY HARVEST FROM RAILROAD TRAIN VIBRATION

Engineers have won a national award for an innovative energy harvester that has the potential to save millions of dollars in energy costs for railroads while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The team developed a new type of energy harvester that converts the irregular, oscillatory motion of train-induced rail track vibrations into regular, unidirectional motion, in the same way that an electric voltage rectifier converts AC voltage into DC.

The team's work, "Mechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR) based Railroad Energy Harvester," was awarded "Best Application of Energy Harvesting" at the Energy Harvesting and Storage USA conference, held in Washington.

ESTIMATED RESULT:

Professor Zuo estimates that the invention could save more than $10 million in trackside power supply costs for railroads in New York State alone, along with a reduction of 3000 tons per year of CO₂ and a half million dollars of electricity savings.

TEST CASE:

The U.S. has the longest rail tracks in the world, approximately 140,700 miles. But it is very costly to power the track-side electrical infrastructure, such as the signal lights, cross gates, track switches and monitoring sensors.

Mechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR):

MMR based Railroad Energy Harvester can harness 200 watts of electric energy from train-induced track deflections to power the track-side electrical devices. The innovative mechanical motion rectifier converts the irregular up-and-down vibration motion into unidirectional rotation of the generator by using two one-way clutches, thus breaking the fundamental challenge of vibration energy harvesting and offering significant advantages of high efficiency and high reliability.

APPROVAL:

The technology of the MMR based Railroad Energy Harvester has been licensed to Electric Truck, LLC/Harvest NRG, Inc. The project is supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation's University Transportation Research Center (UTRC-II), New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), SUNY Research Foundation and private industry.

FEATURES:

ü Further increase energy conversion efficiency.

ü Stable power output.

ü The creative implementation of MMR in one shaft design, which proves to increase the energy converting efficiency to over 70 percent.

ü Directly generating high-quality DC power without an electrical rectifier in the vibration environment.

ü Enabling an electrical generator to rotate in one direction with relative steady speed in a more efficient speed region.

ü Changing the negative influence of motion inertia into positive, thus reducing the mechanical stress.

ü Increasing system reliability.

ü Avoids the challenges of friction.

ü Harvest more energy.

FURTHER ACHIEVEMENTS:

Professor Zuo and his team have been working on vibration and thermoelectric energy harvesting in the past several years to harness power from different sources, including trains, cars, tall buildings and ocean waves.

 In 2011, the team won a prestigious R&D 100 Award dubbed the "Oscar of Invention"  for the development of retrofit energy-harvesting shock absorbers that convert vibration, bumps, and motion experienced by the suspension of a vehicle or train into electric power.

 The regenerative shock absorber for cars can harvest 100-400 watts from the vehicle vibrations under normal driving conditions. The shock absorbers also won the Energy Harvesting and Storage USA 2010 award for Best Technology Development of Energy Harvesting. 

E – HEALTH TECHNOLOGY

Scientists are aimed at developing a mobile phone app that can examine blood sample images and diagnose cancer.

WORKING:

 It would work by taking a magnified image of a blood slide via a microscopic lens attached to the smart phone, which the app would then be able to screen for evidence of leukemia -- a blood cancer.

ONCE CREATED:

Smart phone app could be used for

Step 1: Initial diagnosis of people living in remote rural areas in developing countries

Step 2: Enabling rural doctors to analyze blood samples

Step 3: Refer patients to the city hospitals for treatment or further investigation.

Creating a phone app that can perform this screening role would be a low cost and efficient solution to detect leukemia in remote and resource-poor regions. In 2012, approximately 352,000 children and adults around the world developed some form of leukemia with a similar number dying from the cancer.

Once his project is complete, Worawut (Developer) hopes it will help to prevent unnecessary deaths from the disease caused by

-->    Delayed diagnosis

-->    Treatment due to poverty

-->    People living in remote areas far away from large hospitals and laboratories.

AIMS AT:

Use of high performance technology.

Doctors working in remote areas could use the technology to screen patients in their community and refer those with an abnormal result to the larger medical facilities.