Solar power can steam-sterilize surgical instruments, according to a new study — but the contraption needed to do so is not pocket-size.

Sterilizing instruments needed in surgical emergencies like Caesarean births or appendectomies can be a problem in rural clinics in Africa: There may be no electricity, jugs of bleach or tanks of propane.

So a Rice University team recently modified a prototype of an old solar stove to power a simple autoclave, which is a pressure-cooker for instruments, and tested it in the Texas sun.

On all 27 attempts, it reached United States government sterilization standards.

How practical it is awaits African trials; it is nearly 12 feet long and 6 feet tall and has bright curved mirrors to focus sunlight on a water-filled pipe. On sunny days, it can make steam at 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) from about 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Douglas A. Schuler, above, a Rice business professor and lead author of the study, published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, said he “married into the project.” His French father-in-law designed the solar stove years ago after a student trip to West Africa. But women in Haiti, where they tested it, “just hated cooking on it,” Dr. Schuler said, so they found a different use for it.

The initial setup costs about $2,100. But sunlight costs nothing, making five years of operation about $2,000 cheaper than using propane.

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Medical practices are increasingly putting up Facebook pages to promote business and solder their community of patients. By adding social media, pediatricians and clinics are now capturing teenagers, some of their most elusive patients. Unlike younger children, who may see pediatricians several times a year, teenagers visit doctors infrequently. Generally healthy, they may stop by only for health forms for work permits, driver’s licenses and sports teams.

But even as they insist on their growing independence, conflating privacy with secrecy, teenagers can be vulnerable to high-stakes, impulsive behavior. Monitoring them carefully but respectfully is tricky for doctors as well as parents. So while a decade ago practitioners saw the Internet as the enemy, a tool for demanding patients who brandished printouts during visits and called at all hours with obscure questions, adolescent-medicine specialists and pediatricians are now turning technology to their advantage.

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The 5-foot-4-inch, 140-pound “telemedicine” robot is designed to help patients with health emergencies get more rapid treatment from specialists — especially at night, when hospital staff levels are lower.

“Telemedicine is about getting the right expertise to the right place at the right time,” said InTouch chief executive Yulun Wang. “If a patient has a stroke and comes into the emergency room, you better get a stroke neurologist there quickly. Otherwise, through sheer delay, it can be a matter of life or death.”

Called RP-VITA, the robot allows doctors to virtually visit patients in distant locations, carrying on conversations and even taking measurements in real time. Equipped with cameras, microphones, 3-D mapping sensors, a stethoscope, and a video screen “head” that automatically swivels to listen to voices, the robot transmits and receives video, audio, and navigation instructions over a Wi-Fi broadband connection.

Doctors, patients, and hospital staff control the robot with a specialized terminal or via a software application that runs on Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet computer, and talk to one another using a Skype-like video chat displayed on the robot’s main screen.

“I can get data I never had over the phone,” said Dr. Jason Knight, a pediatric emergency care physician at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County in California, who has been testing a prototype of the robot. “There’s never been one time I’ve used it and said, ‘That was a waste of time.’ I always see something I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

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Discussions of game-based learning tend to focus on K-12 classrooms, but educational gaming isn't just for kids. From simulation-based games, to Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, to Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), to Serious Games that take on real-world social issues (see Purdue University's Serious Games Center), higher education is on the path to widespread integration of all sorts of games in all sorts of classrooms.

In its 2012 report on technology trends in higher education, the New Media Consortium predicts that the horizon for widespread adoption of game-based learning is just two to three years away. Despite some challenges, including economic pressures and institutional barriers, it's a good bet that game-based learning will soon be commonplace in most college and university classrooms.

For some quick perspective on the potential power of game-based learning, a good starting point is Tom Chatfield's TED talk "7 Ways Games Reward the Brain." One of Chatfield's key points about digital gaming is that everything can be measured, which means that rewards can constantly be calibrated to keep players engaged.

In the commercial gaming world, this ability to fine-tune reward cycles based on billions of data points from millions of players is used to keep people spending time and money. In educational gaming, the ability to capture immediate, in-depth data about each student's performance opens the door to entirely new modes of measuring progress and achievement, in ways that reward and reinforce engagement.

Assessment can be ongoing. Feedback can be frequent. Students can know where they stand day-by-day, not just at test time, and exactly where they need to work (play) harder or seek assistance. Rewards for effort can motivate students to keep trying when they might otherwise give up, and educators can adjust what and how they are teaching based on immediate feedback about the individual and collective progress of their students.

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At Games for Health 2012 on Thursday – amid talk of virtual worlds, avatars, Kinect sensors, biomechanics, social media crowdsourcing and exergaming – a policymaker from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT said that gaming is "on the radar of the federal government."

Games for Health, currently in its eighth year, is a different kind of health IT conference. Many speakers kicked off their talks with a slide showing "what I'm playing" – games that ranged from old-school Nintendo titles to mobile apps such as Words with Friends to multiplayer online games to Xbox dancing and kickboxing simulations.

"I play a new game every day – like, as a policy," said Peter Smith, who researches immersive learning technologies at Joint ADL Co-Lab in Orlando.

Erin Poetter, from the ONC's department of Consumer e-Health/Innovations, also spends a lot of time thinking about policy. In her presentation, "Adding Play to Our Toolbox: HHS & Games," she explained how, at ONC, "we see games a part of a larger initiative." With their "miraculous ability to take complex data and make it actionable and meaningful," games are the perfect tool to help ONC expand its focus to engage consumers, said Poetter.

After all, just 10 to 20 percent of health outcomes are determined by what happens in the healthcare system. It's important to do whatever's possible to improve health outside of the doc office walls. "Better engagement in health can make a real difference," she said. "More activated patients achieve better results."

Any tools or technology that could spur that engagement can help. Like games. "It's time that healthcare catch up with the way we live the rest of our lives," said Poetter.

Gaming is big business, after all. Really big: a projected $79 billion in revenues in 2012. With applications affecting everything from health and wellness to rehab and physical therapy, PTSD, stroke rehabilitation, autism and more, there's no reason games shouldn't have a big role to play in health. That's why experts from heavy hitters such as Microsoft and United Health, Yale and UPenn – designers, developers, car providers and more, from as far afield as Glasgow, Vienna and Kyushu – convened in Boston this week.

Games offer a whole lot more value beyond mere entertainment, Poetter pointed out. They can motivate people to overcome challenges; enable them to visualize change and progress; improve self-efficacy through knowledge and goal sharing and facilitate patient/provider communication and interaction. And they can do even more than that. At Games for Health, one session explored how Xbox's Kinect could be be used not just burn calories with its virtual tennis, but be applied to gauging biomechanics and assisting with telesurgery and helping with catatonic schizophrenia. There were talks titled "Prescribing Video Games (Not Medication) for ADHD" and "Evaluating the Ergogenic Impact of Music During Exergaming When Players Are Co-Located."

It all points to an exciting future. But FDA regulations are a wild card.

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Two people who are virtually paralyzed from the neck down have learned to manipulate a robotic arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach out and grab objects. One of them, a woman, was able to retrieve a bottle containing coffee and drink it from a straw — the first time she had served herself since her stroke 15 years earlier, scientists reported on Wednesday.

“She had a smile on her face that I and the research team will never forget,” said Dr. Leigh R. Hochberg of the Department of Veterans Affairs, an author of a study reporting the achievement.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the first published demonstration that humans with severe brain injuries can effectively control a prosthetic arm, using tiny brain implants that transmit neural signals to a computer.

Scientists have predicted for years that this brain-computer connection would one day allow people with injuries to the brain and spinal cord to live more independent lives. Previously, researchers had shown that humans could learn to move a computer cursor with their thoughts, and that monkeys could manipulate a robotic arm.

The technology is not yet ready for use outside the lab, experts said, but the new study is an important step forward, providing dramatic evidence that brain-controlled prosthetics are within reach.

“It is a spectacular result, in many respects,” said John Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal who was not involved in the study, “and really the logical next step in the development of this technology. This is the kind of work that has to be done, and it’s further confirmation of the feasibility of using this kind of approach to give paralyzed people some degree of autonomy.”

If ever an industry were ready for disruption, it is the American health care industry. Americans spend about $7,600 a year per person on health care, one in two adults lives with a chronic disease and the average wait time to see a doctor in a metropolitan area is 20 days. Entrepreneurs have responded by starting health care technology companies that are changing the way we interact with the entire system.

They are also responding to an evolving model of health care, which will ultimately be focused more on outcomes than on services, and to the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Records Incentive Program, which, in an effort to improve the coordination of care, gives providers financial incentives to adopt electronic health records and report how they use them. “We are about to see a fundamental transformation in the way care is delivered and the way patients are engaged with that care,” said Frank Moss, head of the New Media Medicine Group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. Here is a sampling of the innovative companies pushing that transformation.

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There are many times when it is inappropriate to tweet. At dinner, for one. In the middle of a movie. And, in most cases, open heart surgery.

Dr. Paresh Patel, however, had a good reason to tweet during a 57-year-old patient’s double-coronary artery bypass — to create awareness for Heart Month, an initiative to prevent heart attacks and strokes in the United States.

Dr. Michael Macris, medical director of cardiovascular surgery at Memorial Hermann Northwest in Houston, performed the surgery while Patel performed the important duties of tweeting, taking photos and answering live questions from some of @houstonhospital‘s 4,910 followers, according to Texas Monthly.

The hospital then put together a Storify of the whole affair, which is both informative and very, very graphic. Seriously, if you are squeamish, do not scroll down.

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The smartphone revolution is set to be used to safeguard the nation’s wellbeing after the government unveiled plans in which healthcare professionals will encourage patients to use the latest apps to keep an eye on their health.

A shortlist of tools which could be recommended by GPs to patients is to be compiled from an event showcasing the best new and existing phone apps. It is thought target groups who could be asked to use apps are diabetes patients, those with high blood pressure and people who suffer from post-traumatic stress.

An existing app which is already used in Great Ormond Street is Patients Know Best, which allows people to have access to all of their medical records and also controls who else can look at them.

People with diabetes will also be able to benefit from a new app which will issue reminders on taking medication and performing blood sugar level tests. The information can then be sent via electronic format to the surgery.

Health secretary Andrew Lansley said: “So many people use apps every day to keep up with their friends, with the news, find out when the next bus will turn up or which train to catch.

“I want to make using apps to track blood pressure, to find the nearest source of support when you need it and to get practical help in staying healthy the norm.

“With more information at their fingertips, patients can truly be in the driving seat.”

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We had a very positive response to the webinar (Feb 8) "Overcoming Technological Challenges of Setting Up a Simulation Facility" by Michael Young, Technology Support Specialist, Tarleton State University, Texas and Mark Jarvis, Manager, Engineering, Education Management Solutions.

With any new building or retrofit project, the challenges of designing it to meet aesthetic and operational concerns are hard enough. But when you add the issues surrounding simulation technology and its requirements into the mix, the challenges can be overwhelming. The webinar presenters focused on strategies that will help simulation program decision-makers tackle these issues with more confidence and targeted outcomes.
 
There were so many questions, yet little time to answer them all. Here’s your chance to continue the conversation with Michael and Mark. Post your questions/comments here and get a response.

If you missed the webinar and would like a copy of slides and a link to the recorded webinar, click on the “Contact Us” tab at the top.