Augmented Reality in the Operating Rooms
Augmented reality is mostly used for games these days, but it looks like it may finally find its place outside the entertainment industry. HoloEyes, a Japanese company, plans to bring it into the hospitals’ operating rooms.
While we don’t know too much about this new technology yet, we’ve got a video that shows it in action – check it out!
If all goes as planned, these useful AR technologies should be present in most healthcare units within the next few years.
Nanodiscs Boost System Immunity
Immunotherapy has been used to fight cancer for decades. The good news is that a team of researchers at Michigan University have created several nanodiscs that teach the immune system how to attack tumors.
These discs are made of synthetic, high density lipoproteins and contain neoantigens, which can determine the immune response of certain tumors. The human-made particles are released into the body, with the goal of teaching the T-cells how to attack cancer cells.
This new technology has been tested on mice, and the results were very encouraging: close to 30% of the T-cells in the body started fighting cancer after the nanodiscs were introduced. When the nanodisc technology was combined with other treatment methods that amplify the T-cell efficacity, the tumors were gone in most of the mice within 10 days.
VERA: Your Virtual Physical Therapist
Reflexion Health is the company that has built the Virtual Exercise Rehabilitation Assistant (VERA). It’s a device that uses the tele-rehab platform, and can help patients do the necessary exercises while being in their homes.
The quality of the exercises is monitored, and the results can be sent to a physical therapist, which will analyze them.
The VERA system incorporates a complex software application, a touch screen, and a Microsoft Kinect camera, which is used to record the patient’s motion.
By making use of an avatar, the software can educate the patients, showing them the prescribed exercises. Then, it is the patient’s turn to perform the exercises several times, allowing the software to calculate the skeletal position, the angles made by the joints, as well as the limb velocity. Patients can also receive real-time feedback as they exercise.