WeirdMedical™

If you were a kid what would you like to know?

How about this?  A few third graders tested their hypotheses as to which bandages stay on the longest…Read on…

"Band-Aids" Science Fair Projects

Are you listening J&J Band-Aid or Curad or Nexcare?

These are your graduating scientists and biomedical engineers of the 2030′s and beyond!

Did you ever imagine as a kid, losing the ability to walk and getting a pair of robotic pants that your clumsily staggered around the house in?

Or…did you ever pretend you lost your eyesight and got a pair of ooky biomechanical “popping” eyes to peer at your friends?

Well, here they are 12 recent advances in robotics that even most kids did not imagine…

Advances In Medical Robotics

So goes the $6M Bionic Man…read on…

NASA…no need to say more.

Can we really be moving into a new era where what the patient experiences – feels, touches and even smells – really matters?

Can our medical device industry be moving in the direction of consumer marketing where patient-based consumer-type-products are becoming reality?

“There’s something called value-based purchasing in [health-care reform] that actually measures patient satisfaction,” according to Bob Schwartz, general manager of global design for GE Healthcare, “— and hospitals are reimbursed, in part at least, on what those patient satisfaction scores say.”

Bob Schwartz, general manager of global design for GE Healthcare

It actually appears that the patient’s feedback and opinions are starting to matter as much as those of our medical professionals. Especially now that U.S. healthcare reform driven by the balance of better procedural outcomes, patient satisfaction through provider rating systems, and cost containment is creating a perfect storm.

Read more about this “Proctor & Gamble” marketing approach…it’s not the science of technology but the science of consumer behavior!

These headlines go to show you that humans and their inventions are adequate but rarely perfect…

FDA clot device advisory tells of patients’ risks (re: Inferior Vena Cava Filters)

Left-sided Cancer: Blame your bed and TV?

A Newly Candid FDA on the Future Of Medical Device Regulation (re: example – external infusion pumps, pp. 3 & 4)

Mobile toilet tissue role

Who of us in the medical industry would have the guts to give a neurosurgeon permission to have our infant’s brain glued?

According to the authors – “It was just a few months before the parents noticed Joley’s head was growing rapidly and was unusually larger than [her twin's] Jared’s . Her mother could see the tiny veins in Joley’s head bulging out from her scalp.”

…But crazy glue worked!

Image of glue in Ella-Grace Honeymans brain

Got to love N-butyl-cyanoacrylate…read more at HealthMad.com…

You-Tube video of Jonathan’s Cochlear Implant Activation 8 mo., Rt Ear cont\\’d – April 14, 2008

Beautiful Baby Boy

Now this is a good use of our federal tax dollars…

In the northwestern reaches of Washington (D.C. that is) sits a museum that is a “must see” if you like the slightly off-taste, arcane, twisted and in some cases, down-right gross medical oddities. Visit the bricks and mortar “Roadside America of American medicine,” the National Museum of Health and Medicine, America’s oldest taxpayer-funded Cabinet of Curiosities near Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A row of little skeletons.

At the National Museum of Health and Medicine you can see precariously displayed and disturbingly barely described:

• hanging display of a complete brain and spine, suspended in liquid in an eerily lit glass cylinder
• girl’s head preserved in arsenic
• well-preserved hairball from the stomach of a 12-year old girl who compulsively ate her own hair
• skull with a huge civil war bullet buried in its frontal lobe
• and the list goes on…

To visit…virtually go to the RoadsideAmerica.com Team Field Reporters or National Museum of Health and Medicine, or in real life visit:

6900 Georgia Avenue, Washington, DC

Hours:     M-F 10 am – 5:30 pm, Sa, Su, Hol call ahead

No kidding. This is for real – so when you go to the NMHM in D.C., tell them you want your tax dollars’ worth!

Let’s talk space…outer space that is…

On Monday, April 5, a new water filter system flew to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Discovery. It’s mission? To enable emergency intravenous (IV) operations to help sick astronauts in space.

The new IVGEN (IntraVenous Fluid Generation) filtering technology was developed under the code name, “Project Clearwater,” at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio in cooperation with the team under the guidance of Philip Scarpa, medical operations manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

IntraVenous Fluid Generation (IVGEN) water filter

“Currently, NASA’s medical experts have identified at least 115 different scenarios in which a sick or injured astronaut could need an IV while living on the space station, mostly for rehydration of medicine delivery,” according to Remy Melina, SPACE.com Staff Writer. This not weird but neat website, Space.com, explores inventions going into outerspace for evaluation and testing including those for use in human health.

This is one of the last four of the NASA shuttle flights before the shuttle technology is retired:

Images – Life on the Space Station (courtesy of Space.com)

Twitter Discovery STS-131 mission realtime log (courtesy of SpaceFlightNow.com)

Lucky is the next medtech design engineer to follow his/her device into space!

Be it a defibrillator or a MRI scanner, patients become increasingly more vulnerable to hackers each day…

According to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) April 1, 2010 article, “Improving the Security and Privacy of Implantable Medical Devices,”

“…medical devices vary widely with regard to security features, because no specific security guidance or requirements have “     been promulgated by the FDA. In the past, the agency has not viewed itself as a key contributor to the security of medical devices, noting that “the software engineering community, not the FDA, will dictate the solutions.” According to a 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office, the FDA has yet to develop a policy framework for the privacy and security of personal health information.”

Clearly as wireless connectivity becomes more widespread access to device controllers and software becomes even easier. Quoting the MD&DI’s “DeviceTalk” site summary of the NEJM article:

“Hackers could manipulate the technology to:

• Extract data
• Reprogram the devices
• Flood the devices with information to block incoming communication
• Drain a device’s batteries”

As U.S. federal law stands now, medical device manufacturers hold the sole legal responsibility for remaining alert to, aware of, and ready to act on security breeches. This responsibility is dictated by HIPPA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) although no guidelines for device controller or systems software are in place.

The authors of the above NEJM article, Drs. W. H. Maisel and T. Kohno, are urging the FDA to change its position on regulating devices systems software and for manufacturing companies’ software engineers to include security features during the design phase.

Read more…NEJM Article Authors: William H. Maisel, M.D., M.P.H. - Medical Device Safety Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston; and Tadayoshi Kohno, Ph.D. – Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle.“