Health and Wellness

Perhaps the most significant event in global health care in 2014 occurred on February 25, when Health City Cayman Islands had its grand opening. Health City is a new way to think of health care and health care delivery. It has the power to change – or at the least openly challenge – the way Continue Reading →

Google Glass could have a big role in aiding people afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. In a series of medical tests conducted at Newcastle University in the UK, Parkinson’s sufferers volunteered to try Google Glass to see if the gadget could help them better manage certain behaviors and symptoms. The test used five pairs of Glass Continue Reading →

Heart rate, temperature, respiration, and perspiration: These are our autonomous functions–our core physiological processes–that signal stress or arousal and can betray our otherwise cool exteriors. Stanford researcher Gregory Kovacs is reading these signals through a modified Xbox game controller. By adding a new, sensor-laden back plate, he can measure heart rate, blood flow, rate and Continue Reading →

Wearable technology usually evokes images of fitness-tracking wristbands such as the Jawbone UP or FitBit Force. More athletic types might envision Polar H7 strap-on heart rate monitors or Nike Fuel bands, while others might think about Samsung’s Galaxy Gear or try to imagine what Apple’s new iWatch might look like. But wearable technology is quickly Continue Reading →

With kids in the US clocking in screen time like it’s a full-time job — they spend on average seven hours a day in front of some sort of screen — researchers at Iowa State University decided to investigate what sort of effects, if any, parental monitoring of all that screen time might have. What Continue Reading →

App developer Runtastic has carved a sizable ‘niche’ for itself in the digital fitness realm in recent years, notching up north of seventy million downloads since its foundation in 2009. This figure includes all platforms and its myriad of apps – which covers ones for homebodies and others specifically for those wishing to get a Continue Reading →

A San Diego law firm has filed a lawsuit alleging Fitbit misled customers in its marketing after nearly two percent of people who used the San Francisco company’s latest wearable device developed skin irritations. Last month, the company issued a voluntary recall of the Fitbit Force after complaints of rashes and blisters, and agreed to Continue Reading →

IBM and the New York Genome Center announced a partnership to test whether Watson, the computer that won on Jeopardy, can sift through the genomes of cancer patients and help doctors pick drugs. This effort could hold the key to making DNA sequencing for cancer affordable, but there is a vast amount of work to Continue Reading →

Seven years out from the original iPhone’s introduction, and four years past the iPad’s launch, Apple has found its next market ripe for reinvention: the mobile healthcare and fitness-tracking industry. Apple’s interest in healthcare and fitness tracking will be displayed in an iOS application codenamed Healthbook. I first wrote about Apple’s plans for Healthbook in Continue Reading →

While the next iPhone might be able to quantify your health and fitness, your current one cannot. A new iPhone case called Wello, however, plans to change all that. Wello has built-in sensors that give you a glimpse into your overall health simply by holding your phone in a certain way. The case can measure Continue Reading →