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A Map App For Wheelchair Users

Getting around a city can be hard when you’re in a wheelchair because some places simply aren’t designed for wheels. Wheelmap is an iPhone app for wheelchair users which tells you about the accessibility of nearby restaurants, cafes, clubs, museums, and other locations.

Locations are color-coded on a map to show how accessible they are. The current location, but also any place around the world, can be viewed. Maps are based on OpenStreetMap data, and accessibility data about locations can be modified and sent back to the servers by users from within the app. There is also a corresponding website showing the same information online.

As with any other crowd-sourced initiative, success depends on the number of contributors, but we have good hopes for this one to succeed. Because the app was created by a German, coverage is most extensive in Germany, particularly Berlin, but other large cities worldwide are starting to catch up.

More from AP: German iPhone app guides handicapped around cities…

iTunes link: Wheelmap…

Homepage: Wheelmap…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

The Human Genome Turns 10

The human genome has been around for a bit more than ten years, but on February 15, 2001, the first complete human genome sequence was published. This was nothing short of a revolution within medicine. Since then, great advancements have been made in our understanding of genetics and its associations with human traits and diseases.

Nature is celebrating this tenth birthday with a special titled “Human Genome at Ten.” In it, multiple papers reflect on what we learned and discovered, what is still unknown, and what we can expect for the near future. Best of all, Nature has packaged the special in a free iPad app for everyone to read, which features interactive graphs, videos, and audio commentaries.

Nature special: The Human Genome at Ten…

iTunes link: Nature Human Genome Special Edition…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

IBM’s Watson Could Revolutionize Healthcare

If you’ve been watching Jeopardy! over the past couple days, you probably know that IBM’s highly-advanced artificial intelligence software, Watson, has been competing against Jeopardy!’s most successful contestants (and as of Tuesday night, took a commanding lead over the humans, despite having some trouble with United States geography).

Besides the amazing ability to power through “Daily Doubles” and answer random trivia in the form of a question, IBM researchers believe that Watson could revolutionize the healthcare industry. From diagnostics to informatics, Watson could quickly search through medical records, clinical documents, and research information for precise answers that would benefit both doctors and patients.

Check out the video below to see physicians explain how Watson’s technology could transform medicine.

Also watch the TED.com webcast of Dr. David Ferrucci (Principal Investigator of the DeepQA/Watson project at IBM), Dr. Herbert Chase (Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University School of Physicians and Surgeons), and others discussing the Jeopardy! challenge and the impact the technology behind Watson could have on society.

More information on Watson from IBM…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

A Giant Artificial Gut

What do you do when you’re one of the world’s biggest food companies and you’re looking to explore what happens after your products get chewed and swallowed? Apparently you build a large refrigerator-sized, million dollar model of a human gut, complete with valves, injection ports for enzymes, and a transparent window for visibility, of course.

Nestle, in their quest to create foods that trick your body into feeling even more satisfied after eating than you otherwise would be, has a research and development center that holds this artificial gut, tucked next to the mountains in Lausanne, Switzerland. Here they’re busy studying and trying to commercialize gastrointestinal phenomenon such as the “ileal break,” a peptidal feedback mechanism that both slows transit through the GI system and reduces food intake by triggering feelings of satiation. They hope to release products based on this science within five years.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Tracking the movement of food in a person’s gastrointestinal tract isn’t easy. So at a “digestion lab”—part of Nestle’s sprawling research and development center here—scientists use a million-dollar model of the human gut.

The machine is about the size of a large refrigerator. It has several compartments linked by valves, and it is carefully calibrated to the body’s temperature. The entire setup is controlled by a computer. The front is glass, allowing observers to watch as food travels through the system.

On a recent day, the “stomach” section at the top slowly squeezed and churned a salt solution, just like the real thing. The liquefied result then wended its way down the other tubes, representing other sections of the digestive tract. At each stage, tiny valves released the appropriate salt, bile and enzymes, which helped to digest the food.

The question still stands: What comes out the other end?

The Wall Street Journal article: Hungry? Your Stomach Really Does Have a Mind of Its Own…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Organ Generation: Building A Beating Heart

The National Geographic Channel is currently featuring the latest in organ generation technology in its “Explorer” series. Here’s a snippet from the full show:

Check your local listings for times.

Link: Explorer: How to Build a Beating Heart…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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