A wireless, battery-free pacemaker has shown success in powering the heart in pig models, according to researchers from Rice University and Texas Heart Institute. The pacemaker, designed by lead researcher Aydin Babakhani, gets its energy wirelessly from radio frequency radiation that gets transmitted wirelessly from an external battery pack from a few centimeters away. Get […]
Magnets, nanoparticles open and close blood vessels for targeted drug delivery
Tightly-packed endothelial cells line blood vessels and maintain a highly structured barrier. But researchers from Rice University, Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found a way to selectively create “leaky” blood vessels for targeted drug delivery. The team’s study, which was published in Nature Communications, reported that magnets can help lead iron-oxide nanoparticles […]
Why prosthetics need tactile feedback
Tactile feedback enabled blindfolded test subjects to more than double their ability to determine the size of objects they grasped with a prosthetic hand, according to U.S. and Italian engineers. “Humans have an innate sense of how the parts of their bodies are positioned, even if they can’t see them,” said Marcia O’Malley, professor of […]
Study: Patient error cuts dose in half for inhalers
Researchers from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have identified patient errors that cause inhaler users to get about half as much medicine as they should from each dose. The team said that clinicians have known for years that patients don’t use their inhalers as prescribed, but inhaler-dosing studies tend to focus on the rare cases […]
