Though the original Star Trek made its debut in 1966, in many ways, most of the technology it portrayed is still light years ahead. However, some of Star Trek’s technology has actually materialized in the last five decades: cell phones, for example, were inspired by the flip phone-like capabilities of communicators in the original series...... Read more
January/February 2016

Bloom Technology
Recent advances in healthcare technology seem to follow two main trends. First is a slow but steady shift away from institutional settings such as hospitals and clinics to more personalized, consumer-like settings. Second is a trend toward “analytics.” The ability to comb through massive amounts of data to d... Read more

The Best We Can Be
Best We Can Be, launched in 2012 as a summer and after-school program, teaches STEM subjects through hands-on experiences with Electronic Health Record (EHR) software and Health Information Technology (HIT). This focus allows students to explore many interdisciplinary connections.... Read more

Visions of a Bionic Eye
Most of our everyday experiences arise through interaction with our environment as well as through socialization with people; be they loved ones, friends, or colleagues. Being able to experience and recognize sensat... Read more

PULSE On Stage: Electronic Health Records
What went wrong? Can it be fixed? Find out what medical thought leaders had to say about the problem of Electronic Health Records at the first Pulse On Stage event held February 28 in Las Vegas. ... Read more

Transforming Health Care
Despite the myriad assistive technologies that have been developed over the years, high installation costs and limited functionalities have prevented their widespread adoption...... Read more

John Rogers and the Ultrathin Limits of Technology
When Northwestern University near Chicago, Illinois, announced in August 2015 that it had hired away “soft electronics” pioneer John Rogers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the exuberant repo... Read more

Convergence Revolution Comes to Wearables
In the field of wearable biomedical sensors, the convergence revolution is more than a fanciful, utopian view of the way innovation should be done...... Read more

The End of Seizures and Depression?
IEEE Pulse speaks with Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., a professor in the Media Laboratory and the director of affective computing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).... Read more

From Micro to Nano
Over the past decade, embedded systems and microelectromechanical systems have evolved in a radical way, redefining our standard of living and enhancing the quality of life. Health care, among various other fields, ... Read more

Psychophysiological Monitoring
The current gold standard for diagnosis of mental health disorders is a clinical interview in which the patient and clinician discuss the patient’s symptoms and history...... Read more

The Body Metric
Beads of sweat trickle down your forehead. As your heart races, the screen becomes more static. Though it’s just a video game, you feel imprisoned in a nightmare.... Read more

The Telltale Heartbeat
The pulse rate has long been considered a basic and essential window on a person’s general physical condition. A racing heart could mean a person is at risk for a heart attack or, conversely, simply stressed, exci... Read more

Are Wearables Safe?
Sometime over the last few years, wearable electronics have become the norm. Whether it’s a cell phone attached to a holster at the hip, a smart watch on the wrist, or sensors on and sometimes woven into clothing,... Read more

Teaching the Real World
In this innovative program, students are organized into teams and shadow doctors and health care professionals in various areas of the hospital to find unmet needs. The team identifies the top need, which is develop... Read more
Editorial Blogs
Pick
Challenges in Patient-Specific Computer Simulations of Image-Guided Therapies
For many therapeutic interventions, imaging has become an essential component of initial diagnosis....
IEEE EMBS International Students Conference of Egypt (ISC-Egypt 2015)
The second IEEE EMBS International Students Conference of Egypt (ISC-Egypt'15), held 21-22 October 2015, was a scientific "by-students and for-students" gathering with a focus on biomedical and healthcare technologies...... Read more
Analyzing How Devices Are Used
As a former design instructor, the title of this text interested me because I had not personally used the term contextual inquiry in my teaching, nor had I read it in literature.... Read more
The Hygiene Hypothesis
Some call it the five-second rule, some extend that to five minutes, and some don’t care. This is the amount of time...... Read more
Highlights in the History of the Fourier Transform
In general, integral transforms are useful tools for solving problems involving certain types of partial differential equations (PDEs), mainly when their solutions on the corresponding domains of definition are difficult to deal with. For a given PDE defined on a domain...... Read more