Consider this T-shirt: It can monitor your heart rate and breathing, analyze your sweat and even cool you off on a hot summer’s day. What about a pillow that monitors your brain waves, or a solar-powered dress that can charge your ipod or MP4 player? This is not science fiction - this is cotton in 2010. Now, the laboratory of Juan Hinestroza, assistant professor of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, has developed cotton threads that can conduct electric current as well as a metal wire can, yet remain light and comfortable enough to give a whole new meaning to multi-use garments…

Investigators have developed a new mathematical approach to analyze molecular data derived from complex mixtures of immune cells. This approach, when combined with well-established techniques, readily identifies changes in small samples of human whole blood, and has the potential to distinguish between health and disease states. Led by Mark Davis, Ph.D., and Atul Butte, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University, Calif…

With the new health care IT technology already in use, preparation for the accompanying consequences should be on every family’s mind, advises Martine Ehrenclou, author of the multiple award-winning, self-help guide Critical Conditions: The Essential Hospital Guide To Get Your Loved One Out Alive (Lemon Grove Press). The FDA has received 260 reports in the last two years submitted voluntarily about health IT malfunctions that had the potential to cause harm to patients, including reports of 44 injuries and six deaths…

Online social networks could help with communications and recovery for people with disabilities following major natural disasters, or even terrorist attack, according to a research paper in the International Journal of Emergency Management. In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, other natural disasters, and even technological emergencies it has become obvious that there is a serious need for disaster and emergency preparedness for people with disabilities…

It is not enough to have a Braille keyboard or a computer that speaks. Until Internet can better adapt to their needs, disabled persons will continue to have a big disadvantage with respect to other users. With his PhD thesis, researcher Mr Markel Vigo aimed to smooth out this complicated relationship. On the one hand, he tested a system that facilitates creating a more personalised Internet for the disabled and, on the other, devised innovative techniques for experts in adapting web pages…

The American Medical Association has made deals with computer retailer Dell, and Ingenix, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, to “help physicians adopt and implement electronic health records”, the Chicago Tribune reports. The terms of the deals were not released, but one part of the arrangement with Ingenix will be to offer doctors a Web-based medical record system called CareTracker…

“The race to streamline online access to medical records turned into a stampede this week as leading high-tech vendors trumpeted new initiatives at the Health Information and Management Systems Society” (HIMSS) trade show in Atlanta,” InternetNews.com/Datamation reports, adding that Dell, Google, IBM, Microsoft and others are touting “new and pending deals designed to help consumers, doctors and hospital move to more easily accessible, but also secure, medical histories and information online” (Needle, 3/1)…

Canada is lagging behind many countries in the use of electronic health records and it is critical that the country’s medical and political leaders set targets for universal adoption, states an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). While Canada has invested more than $1.6 billion in federal funds to develop integrated electronic health records, only 37% of general practitioners use electronic records compared with 97% in New Zealand and 95% in Australia…

Patients don’t have enough information about electronic patient records and it is too hard for them to opt-out if they want to, the BMA said today. Following limited local piloting, patients’ summary care records1 are now going to be uploaded to a central database across England. Five Strategic Health Authorities recently announced they were speeding up their plans2. Anyone who does not want to have a Summary Care Record (SCR) has to opt out3 by informing their GP or by completing a form either downloaded from the internet or requested through an ‘0845′ national call centre…

Should doctors around the country use e-prescribing to decrease prescription errors? A study led by physician-scientists from Weill Cornell Medical College found that health care providers using an electronic system to write prescriptions were seven times less likely to make errors than those writing their prescriptions by hand. The study appears today in the online edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. There is currently a strong push in the United States to encourage doctors to write electronic prescriptions in the ambulatory setting, where an estimated 2…