#Smart devices track hand-washing in hospitals to help reduce the spread of infection In fact,
in 2009 THE WHO released its ive Moments of Hand Hygieneguidelines, which pinpoint five key moments
when hospital staff should wash their hands: before touching a patient, before aseptic procedures, after possible exposure to bodily fluids,
after touching a patient, and after touching a patient surroundings. But it been difficult to track workerscompliance with these guidelines.
Administrators usually just spend a few days a month monitoring health care workers, noting hand-hygiene habits on a WHO checklist.
and Philip Liang SM 6 is using smart devices to monitor hand hygiene among hospital staff
which affected one in 25 U s. hospital patients in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Medsense system includes a smart badge, beacons, dispenser monitors, and a base station. Courtesy of General Sensing The Medsense system includes a smart badge, beacons, dispenser monitors,
and a base station. Courtesy of General Sensing Called Medsense Clear, the system revolves around a badge worn by hospital staff.
The badge can tell when a worker comes near or leaves a patient side, and whether that worker has used an alcohol-based sanitizer or soap dispenser during those times.
It also vibrates to remind workers to wash up. The badge then sends data to a base station that pushes the data to a Web page where individuals can monitor their hand-washing,
and administrators can see data about overall hand-hygiene compliance among staff. A 2014 study in the Journal of Infection and Public health concluded that compliance with WHO hand-washing rules jumped 25 percent in one month when staff used Medsense in a 16-bed hospital unit at Salmaniya
Medical Complex in Bahrain. Currently, the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospital in London is studying the correlation between the Medsense system and reduction in HAIS.
The startup is also now developing a system to monitor hospital workflow, with aims of pinpointing areas where time
and resources may be wasted by unnecessary wait times for patients. ee trying to drive safety with hand hygiene,
and drive efficiency by reducing waste, Gips says. eally, wee trying to be a support system for the hospital.
In the atient zone Medsense consists of four smart devices, including the badge, that communicate with each other.
Beacons installed near patients are tuned to cover small or large areas, creating a atient zone.
The badge knows if the wearer has washed his or her hands, because the system soap dispensers are designed to sense pressure
and does so again when the wearer leaves the zone. An example of what a user may see on the Medsense HQ website.
Compliance rates are listed as percentages by shifts and units. A graph displays compliance averages by the week.
Courtesy of General Sensing An example of what a user may see on the Medsense HQ website.
Compliance rates are listed as percentages by shifts and units. A graph displays compliance averages by the week.
Courtesy of General Sensing e think it important that the system provides feedback when it actionable without getting in the way of delivering care,
When workers are within 50 feet of the station, the station routes the badge data over the network to an online dashboard, called Medsense HQ.
These stations also have 16 charging slots for the badge flat batteries. In Medsense HQ, individuals can track, for instance,
Administrators can see aggregated data indicating, for instance, which units are more or less compliant with hand-hygiene protocols.
Medsense consistently shows that hand hygiene increases to about 90 percent as staff know theye being watched by administrators,
a phenomenon called the Hawthorne Effect. el look at the data and can pinpoint when the wearer is being watched.
Youl see the data spike and then go back down when the observer leaves, he says.
Medsense, on the other hand, removes that observer bias, he says, and can collect data around the clock. leanstart General Sensing may tackle a serious health care issue,
but its core technology started as a novelty item: smart dog collars. In the Media Laboratory class MAS 834 (Tangible Interfaces), Liang, Gips,
and Noah Paessel SM 5 created dog collars equipped with RFID technology and accelerometers. These tracked a dog movement,
communicated with smart collars worn by other dogs, and pushed that data online. Owners could log on to a social media site to check their petsexercise levels, interactions,
and compare stats with other pets. t was a bit tongue-in-cheek, Gips admits. But the students soon found themselves presenting a prototype to hundreds at human computer interaction conference in Portland,
Oregon where it garnered significant attention. With help from Media Lab entrepreneurial advisors and MIT Venture Mentoring Service
the students launched SNIF Labs (an acronym for ocial Networking in Fur in 2008 and began selling the collars.
But after that year financial collapse, uxury pet products weren exactly selling, Gips says. When a researcher requested the technology to monitor health care staff,
however, the startup decided to get a clean start in the health care industry, hich they say is recession-proof,
Gips says. And after learning about WHO hand-hygiene guidelines, the team developed Medsense as an automated way to help administrators monitor hand-washing among staff.
In 2011, researchers at Queen Mary Hospital in Hong kong published a paper in the journal Biomed Infectious disease that found Medsense was 88 percent accurate in monitoring staff compliance with THE WHO guidelines.
Only then did the startup decide to commercialize this system. ee from MIT: We like publishing,
Gips says. e needed to know we had something accurate. Cutting waste Since then, General Sensing has raised more than $15 million in capital,
and Medsense has been trialed in 10 hospitals across the United states and Europe, and in Saudi arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.
But the data Medsense collects on time spent near and around patients has proven to have another use:
the startup is developing small RFID tags that patients and staff wear, and ceiling-mounted transponders to track the tags, in real-time,
as the wearers move through the atient journeythe waiting room, pre-procedure, procedure, and recovery room. General Sensing creates digital floor maps of an area being studied;
patients and staff show up on the floor map as color-coded dots. This allows the startup to gather data on patient wait times, treatment patterns,
and other things that may reveal wasted time and resources. hanging even seemingly simple workflows can require buy in from a lot people.
It helps to have quantifiable proof of the problem, Gips says. Another possible application is real-time location of surplus staff particularly important when there a sudden influx of patients in one area of a hospital,
Gips says. oday, you have to call different units to see who has extra people on staff,
he explains. ith our system, wee hoping you can log in and see where there are extra people that can come help.
That waste can turn into a critical safety measure. Source: MIT, written by Rob Matheso e
and in the end the distribution of runners on the street will be very broad. Something similar happens to a pulse of light sent through a medium.
Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have found a way to compress intense laser pulses by a factor of 20 to just 4. 5 just by sending them through a cleverly designed hollow fibre.
Inside the fibre however there is a carefully designed nanostructure which allows short wavelengths to travel through the fibre faster than longer ones.
The nanostructure inside the fibre is called agomewhich is Japanese for asket weave This special fibre that allows undistorted transmission of these extremely short pulses was designed
and fabricated by the research group of Fetah Benabid at Limoges University France. For years extremely short infrared laser pulses have been used to unravel the secrets of the quantum world.
New Tool for Further Researchin their recent publication the researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have demonstrated already that their laser pulses can be used for highly advanced experiments:
The photonics team at the Vienna University of Technology is planning to use this new technology for a variety of measurements in the future
#Nanoscale mirrored cavities amplify connect quantum memories The idea of computing systems based on controlling atomic spins just got a boost from new research performed at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) and the U s. Department of energy (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory.
By constructing tiny irrorsto trap light around impurity atoms in diamond crystals, the team dramatically increased the efficiency with
Such spin-photon interfaces are thought to be essential for connecting distant quantum memories, which could open the door to quantum computers and long-distance cryptographic systems.
Photons that enter these nanoscale funhouses bounce back and forth up to 10 000 times, greatly enhancing their chance of interacting with the electrons in the NV center.
and long-range cryptographic networks. ur research demonstrates a technique to extend the storage time of quantum memories in solids that are coupled efficiently to photons,
which is essential to scaling up such quantum memories for functional quantum computing systems and networks, said MIT Dirk Englund,
Scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven Lab, helped to fabricate
and characterize the materials. he memory elements described in this research are the spin states of electrons in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond.
The NV consists of a nitrogen atom in the place of a carbon atom, adjacent to a crystal vacancy inside the carbon lattice of diamond.
The up or down orientation of the electron spins on these NV centers can be used to encode information in a way that is somewhat analogous to how the charge of many electrons is used to encode the and in a classical computer.
or back into using microwaves. The state has brighter fluorescence than the state, allowing scientists to measure the state in an optical microscope.
The trick is getting the electron spins in the NV centers to hold onto the stable spin states long enough to perform these logic gate operationsnd being able to transfer information among the individual memory elements to create actual computing networks
These cavities, nanofabricated at Brookhaven by MIT graduate student Luozhou Li with the help of staff scientist Ming Lu of the CFN, consist of layers of diamond
Photons that enter these nanoscale funhouses bounce back and forth up to 10,000 times, greatly enhancing their chance of interacting with the electrons in the NV center.
The devicesperformance was characterized in part using optical microscopy in a magnetic field at the CFN, performed by CFN staff scientist Mircea Cotlet, Luozhou Li,
and Edward Chen, who is also a graduate student studying under the guidance of Englund at MIT. oupling the NV centers with these optical resonator cavities seemed to preserve the NV spin coherence timehe duration of the memory,
Cotlet said. Added Englund: hese methods have given us a great starting point for translating information between the spin states of the electrons among multiple NV centers.
he transferred hard mask lithography technique that we have developed in this work would benefit most unconventional substrates that aren suitable for typical high-resolution patterning by electron beam lithography.
In our case, we overcame the problem that hundred-nanometer-thick diamond membranes are too small and too uneven.
#Computing at the speed of light University of Utah engineers have taken a step forward in creating the next generation of computers
and mobile devices capable of speeds millions of times faster than current machines. The Utah engineers have developed an ultracompact beamsplitter the smallest on record for dividing light waves into two separate channels of information.
and shuttle data with light instead of electrons. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues describe their invention today in the journal Nature Photonics.
The overhead view of a new beamsplitter for silicon photonics chips that is the size of one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.
University of Utah Electrical and Computer engineering Associate professor Rajesh Menon is leading a team that has created the world smallest beamsplitter for silicon photonic chips.
The discovery will lead to computers and mobile devices that could be millions of times faster than machines today
because the information or data that is computed or shuttled is done through light instead of electrons. Image credit:
Dan Hixson/University of Utah College of Engineeringsilicon photonics could significantly increase the power and speed of machines such as supercomputers, data center servers and the specialized computers that direct autonomous cars and drones with collision detection.
Eventually, the technology could reach home computers and mobile devices and improve applications from gaming to video streaming. ight is the fastest thing you can use to transmit information,
says Menon. ut that information has to be converted to electrons when it comes into your laptop.
In that conversion, youe slowing things down. The vision is to do everything in light. Photons of light carry information over the Internet through fiber-optic networks.
But once a data stream reaches a home or office destination the photons of light must be converted to electrons before a router
or computer can handle the information. That bottleneck could be eliminated if the data stream remained as light within computer processors. ith all light,
computing can eventually be millions of times faster, says Menon. To help do that, the U engineers created a much smaller form of a polarization beamsplitter
(which looks somewhat like a barcode) on top of a silicon chip that can split guided incoming light into its two components.
Before, such a beamsplitter was over 100 by 100 microns. Thanks to a new algorithm for designing the splitter
Menon team has shrunk it to 2. 4 by 2. 4 microns, or one-fiftieth the width of a human hair and close to the limit of what is physically possible.
The beamsplitter would be just one of a multitude of passive devices placed on a silicon chip to direct light waves in different ways.
By shrinking them down in size, researchers will be able to cram millions of these devices on a single chip.
Potential advantages go beyond processing speed. The Utah team design would be cheap to produce
because it uses existing fabrication techniques for creating silicon chips. And because photonic chips shuttle photons instead of electrons
mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets built with this technology would consume less power, have longer battery life
and generate less heat than existing mobile devices. The first supercomputers using silicon photonics already under development at companies such as Intel
and IBM will use hybrid processors that remain partly electronic. Menon believes his beamsplitter could be used in those computers in about three years.
Data centers that require faster connections between computers also could implement the technology soon, he says.
Source: University of Uta o
#Taking control of light emission Researchers have found a way to couple the properties of different two-dimensional materials to provide an exceptional degree of control over light waves.
They say this has the potential to lead to new kinds of light detection, thermal-management systems,
and high-resolution imaging devices. The new findings using a layer of one-atom-thick graphene deposited on top of a similar 2-D layer of a material called hexagonal boron nitride (hbn) are published in the journal Nano Letters.
The work is authored co by MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas Fang and graduate student Anshuman Kumar
and their co-authors at IBM T. J. Watson Research center, Hong kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Minnesota.
Although the two materials are structurally similar both composed of hexagonal arrays of atoms that form two-dimensional sheets they each interact with light quite differently.
But the researchers found that these interactions can be complementary, and can couple in ways that afford a great deal of control over the behavior of light.
The hybrid material blocks light when a particular voltage is applied to the graphene, while allowing a special kind of emission and propagation,
called yperbolicity, when a different voltage is applied a phenomenon not seen before in optical systems,
Many researchers see improved interconnection of optical and electronic components as a path to more efficient computation and imaging systems.
Light interaction with graphene produces particles called plasmons while light interacting with hbn produces phonons.
the plasmons and phonons can couple, producing a strong resonance. The properties of the graphene allow precise control over light,
Phaedon Avouris, a researcher at IBM and co-author of the paper, says, he combination of these two materials provides a unique system that allows the manipulation of optical processes.
to create tiny optical waveguides, about 20 nanometers in size the same size range as the smallest features that can now be produced in microchips.
This could lead to chips that combine optical and electronic components in a single device, with far lower losses than when such devices are made separately and then interconnected,
they say. Co-author Tony Low, a researcher at IBM and the University of Minnesota, says,
ur work paves the way for using 2-D material heterostructures for engineering new optical properties on demand.
because the material naturally works at near-infrared wavelengths, this could enable new avenues for infrared spectroscopy,
Fang says, of biomolecules placed on the hybrid material surface. Sheng Shen, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie mellon University who was involved not in this research,
says, his work represents significant progress on understanding tunable interactions of light in graphene-hbn.
The work is retty criticalfor providing the understanding needed to develop optoelectronic or photonic devices based on graphene and hbn,
he says, and ould provide direct theoretical guidance on designing such types of devices. I am excited personally very about this novel theoretical work. e
#Lawrence Livermore technology could help detect diseases in commercial swine industry Agricultural officials who seek to detect diseases affecting the commercial swine industry may gain a new ally a biological detection system developed by Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers. A study by LLNL and Kansas State university scientists found that the Lawrence Livermore Microbial Detection Array (LLMDA) could help identify diseases in the commercial swine industry.
The research paper will be carried in the May edition of the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation,
which is published by the American Association of Veterinary Laboratory Diagnosticians. Many of the diseases affecting the commercial swine industry involve complex syndromes caused by multiple pathogens
including emerging viruses and bacteria. One pivotal advantage of the Livermore-developed LLMDA over other detection technologies is that it can detect within 24 hours any bacteria
said Raymond obrowland, professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology at Kansas State College of Veterinary medicine. t really the future of diagnostics for both humans and animals.
New infectious diseases in animal food production systems can create enormous impacts that can affect domestic consumption and exports
as well as public health in the case of diseases that can move from animals to humans, the paper authors wrote.
Two examples of new diseases introduced into the swine industry include theinfluenza A virus subtype H1n1 and Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus.
Two other foreign diseases, African swine fever and classical swine fever, remain constant threats to the U s. industry. he best assurance for the timely identification of known and unknown threats is to employ techniques
Currently, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays represent one technology widely used for pathogen detection but typically only a handful of microorganisms can be identified in a single test.
Another method of detecting pathogens, DNA sequencing, greatly expands the number of microorganisms that can be identified,
and requires significant expertise. he LLMDA can identify co-infections from a single sample, said LLNL biologist Crystal Jaing,
who oversees LLNL microbial detection array collaborations. PCR test cannot. The array also can identify co-infections faster and cheaper than DNA sequencing.
In their paper, the authors noted that as the LLMDA technology cost decreases and throughput increases
it becomes feasible to look at microarrays as everyday tools for use in the diagnostic laboratory. he beauty of the LLMDA is that it lets you identify unknown diseases that the researcher isn looking for,
and polymicrobial. hese multiple bacteria and viruses end up in a disease syndrome. Wee looking at a complex situation
and we need the tools that can give us a comprehensive look at the disease factors involved.
who sees the LLMDA as potentially being useful for cattle and poultry diagnostic tests, as well as for pets, such as dogs and cats. he most interesting thing that wee found in our work is that wee been able to pick up not only
what is in the animal, but outside the animal. Wee been able to find out what in the water, the feed and the air,
oral fluid and tonsils from pigs that have co-infections of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) and Porcine circovirus-2 (PCV-2). The LLMDA easily identified PRRSV and PCV-2,
Clostridium and Staphylococcus. he use of the microarray technology could help the U s. detect the emergence of foreign animal diseases at their outset to prevent major disease outbreaks,
including clinical medicine, food safety testing, environmental monitoring and biodefense o
#Nature Inspires First Artificial Molecular Pump Using nature for inspiration, a team of Northwestern University scientists is the first to develop an entirely artificial molecular pump, in
which molecules pump other molecules. This tiny machine is no small feat. The pump one day might be used to power other molecular machines,
The new machine mimics the pumping mechanism of life-sustaining proteins that move small molecules around living cells to metabolize and store energy from food.
For its food, the artificial pump draws power from chemical reactions, driving molecules step-by-step from a low energy state to a high-energy state far away from equilibrium.
Youtube video screenshotur molecular pump is radical chemistry an ingenious way of transferring energy from molecule to molecule,
Stoddart is the Board of trustees Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. ll living organisms,
he said. e are trying to recreate the actions of these proteins using relatively simple small molecules we make in the laboratory. huyang Cheng, a fourth-year graduate student in Stoddart laboratory and first author of the paper,
has spent his Ph d. studies researching molecules that mimic nature biochemical machinery. He first designed an artificial pump two years ago,
The artificial pump is able to syphon off some of the energy that changes hands during a chemical reaction
and uses it to push the rings together. he tiny molecular machine threads the rings around a nanoscopic chain a sort of axle and squeezes the rings together,
with only a few nanometers separating them. At present, the artificial molecular pump is able to force only two rings together,
but the researchers believe it won be long before they can extend its operation to tens of rings and store more energy.
that allows molecules to flow phillenergetically. his is non-equilibrium chemistry, moving molecules far away from their minimum energy state,
they intend to use the energy stored in their pump to power artificial muscles and other molecular machines.
solar panels that could be integrated into windows, and membranes to desalinate and purify water. But all these possible uses face the same big hurdle:
That could finally change with a new process described in the journal Scientific Reports by researchers at MIT and the University of Michigan.
MIT mechanical engineering Associate professor A. John Hart, the paper senior author, says the new roll-to-roll manufacturing process described by his team addresses the fact that for many proposed applications of graphene
where researchers struggle to produce small quantities of graphene often pulling these sheets from a lump of graphite using adhesive tape,
who is the Mitsui Career development Associate professor in Contemporary Technology at MIT. So far, the new system produces graphene that is ot quite equal to the best that can be done by batch processing,
and learning about tradeoffs that can inform the selection of process conditions for specific applications,
or even to growing arrays of carbon nanotubes, which his group is also studying. his is high-quality research that represents significant progress on the path to scalable production methods for large-area graphene,
a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania who was involved not in this work. think that the concentric tube approach is very creative.
#Discovery of a treatment to block the progression of multiple sclerosis A drug that could halt the progression of multiple sclerosis may soon be developed thanks to a discovery by a team at the CHUM Research Centre and the University of Montreal.
and they have shown that blocking this molecule could delay the onset of the disease and significantly slow its progression.
These encouraging results from in vitro tests in humans and in vivo tests in mice were published in the Annals of Neurology. e believe we have identified the first therapy that will impact the quality of life of people with multiple sclerosis by significantly reducing the disability and the disease progression
and professor in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of Montreal. Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurological disease that is characterized by paralysis, numbness, loss of vision,
and gait and balance deficits that lead to chronic disability. There is no effective cure. The disease particularly affects young adults in northern countries.
In Canada, nearly 75,000 people have MS. The brain is protected normally from attacks by the blood-brain barrier.
The blood-brain barrier prevents immune cells lymphocytes from entering the central nervous system. In people with MS there is often leakage.
Two types of lymphocytes, CD4 and CD8, find a way to cross this protective barrier. They attack the brain by destroying the myelin sheath that protects neurons,
resulting in decreased transmission of nerve impulses, and plaque formation. In 2008, Dr. Prat team identified a cell adhesion molecule, called MCAM (Melanoma Cell adhesion molecule),
which plays a crucial role in dysregulation of the immune system observed in multiple sclerosis. ur studies have shown that MCAM is necessary for the migration of CD4 and CD8 across the blood-brain barrier.
If we block the interaction of MCAM with the protein to which it normally binds
we decrease the disease activity, he said. Independently, the biotechnology company Prothena Corporation plc also discovered complementary data regarding MCAM,
which led to an ongoing collaboration between the CRCHUM and Prothena. The results are extremely positive. e observed a decrease of approximately 50%of the disease in mice with experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE),
the most widely used animal model of MS . What is especially significant is that we can stop the disease from the first symptoms
in addition to having an impact on its progression, which is noted a first Prat. MS develops in most patients in two phases.
Later, the diseases progresses and the disability worsens, leading to the use of a cane or wheelchair.
Currently, none of the drugs available on the market affect the disease progression. Prothena has developed a potentially disease-modifying antibody, called PRX003,
which is designed, to inhibit MCAM function and thus prevent migration of destructive lymphocytes into tissue.
Prothena expects to initiate clinical trials of PRX003 in healthy volunteers by the end of June,
and anticipates a study in patients with psoriasis in 2016. Beyond psoriasis, anti-MCAM antibodies may be useful for treating a variety of diseases
including progressive forms of multiple sclerosis. Source: University of Montrea e
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011