Social Network: Tech empowers disadvantaged people to be independent

While it’s no longer difficult for visually challenged to get the first-hand experience of watching a movie with a real-time Braille converter, heart patients can monitor the disease themselves with the help of a tablet-like device. 

A novel e-health tool in the form of a pre-programmed tablet can help heart failure patients to manage their disease including drug dosages, say researchers. The tool called OPTILOGG provides heart failure education, helps patients monitor their weight and indicates when they should contact the clinic, according to a research presented at EuroHeartCare 2017 held at in Jonkoping, Sweden. If the tool detects heart failure deterioration, the patient is instructed to increase the dose of diuretics. If weight gain is above a pre-determined range patients should contact the heart failure clinic. Patients can use OPTILOGG as required without pushing any buttons and it takes less than 30 seconds a day, the researchers said. 

Researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have invented a technique that types Braille in real time and helps deaf-blind people ‘watch’ television without intermediaries. The project ‘PervasiveSUB’ compiles all the subtitles of television channels and sends them to a central server which forwards them to smartphones or tablets. From there, they are sent to the Braille line of the deaf-blind person through an app making it possible to control the speed of the subtitles that are captured directly from the TV broadcast in perfect synchronisation. PervasiveSUB was financed by Spanish broadband and telecommunications provider Telefonica.

Researchers have developed a sensor that can detect disease markers in breath or toxins in air, as well as tell the levels of sickness. A small and thin square of an organic plastic, the tech could soon be the basis of portable and disposable sensor devices, the team from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said. In the study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials , the team lead by Ying Diao demonstrated the device that monitors ammonia in breath, a sign of kidney failure.