Top TechTop Tech #11: Truck-destroying lasers, life-saving science
Highlighting interesting or important innovations with long-term promise.
In today’s digest:
• Apple to “revolutionize medical studies"
• Satellite camera spots skin cancer signs
• Laser Destroys Truck
Apple to “revolutionize medical studies”
Amidst all the talk today about TV, watches, and skinniernotebooks, Apple announced a more profound development: a software framework designed for medical and health research, “helping doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using iPhone apps.”
What’s more, ResearchKit is open source — anyone can build on it.
Apple reports “world-class research institutions” including UCLA, Mount Sinai, Stanford, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the University of Rochester, “have already developed apps with ResearchKit for studies on asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
ResearchKit works HealthKit, an iPhone toolset which enables third-party devices and apps for such readings as blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use. ResearchKit can also request from a user, access to the accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope and GPS sensors in iPhone to gain insight into a patient’s gait, motor impairment, fitness, speech and memory.
One more way in which tech can potentially deliver better medical care at reduced costs…
Satellite camera spots skin cancer signs
A camera launched into space may find skin cancer in humans here on Earth.
The high-speed infrared camera developed by the European Space Agency “is being adapted to spot changes in human skin cells, invisible to the naked eye, to help diagnose skin diseases like cancer, ESA reports. Mounted on a standard medical scanner, the space sensor can help doctors to look deeper into human tissues for detecting skin diseases earlier.”
In space: “The Proba-V camera has such a unique wide field of view that it allows the small satellite to build a fresh picture of our entire planet’s flora every two days.”
Laser destroys truck
A 30-kilowatt laser scorched through a truck. Lockheed Martin says its weapon system “successfully disabled the engine of a small truck during a recent field test, demonstrating the rapidly evolving precision capability to protect military forces and critical infrastructure.”
The Athena ground-based prototype system (Advanced Test High Energy Asset) “burned through the engine manifold in a matter of seconds from more than a mile away,” the company says. “Fiber-optic lasers are revolutionizing directed energy systems.”
While lasers are expensive to develop, they are also “very cost-effective to use, with each laser shot drastically cheaper than missiles and sometimes even cheaper than bullets,” Popular Science notes.
