health - page 5

Pyle Audio makes one of pretty much everything. If it has wires, knobs, plastic or is made of a material that can be found in or near our solar system, Pyle makes it. Cover for your boat’s stereo? Yes. How about a thingy that detects leaks from microwave ovens? You bet. And a waterproof telephone handset for the shower? Try not to gurgle when your boss calls.

Add one more gadget to the (wait for it) Pyle. This time, the prolific company has proffered up a scale — one of the fancy Bluetooth-connected ones that comes with its own app.

Need a fast, discreet way to determine when you’ve had too much to drink or put a number on all of your inebriated muscle flexing?

The BACtrack S35 breathalyzer is small enough to keep in your pocket, and accurate enough to keep your keys there as well, if necessary. As one of the smallest, sleekest breathalyzers on the market – it also delivers reliable blood alcohol estimates in just five seconds. And Cult of Mac Deals has The BACtrack S35 breathalyzer for 57% off during this limited time offer – only $29.99!

Heart not beating quite right? There’s an app for that.

Researchers for medical device company HealthSTATS International — in association with University College London — have patented the software behind what they claim to be the world’s first app to test for erratic heartbeats.

The Inner Balance system pairs a $99 dongle/earclip sensor with an accompanying app with the goal of training its users to de-stress themselves (probably an over-simplification, but that’s the gist of it) through gamified breathing exercises.

To further this goal, HeartMath, the company behind the Inner Balance kit, has just launched a cloud-based service called HeartCloud to further gamify the Inner Balance sessions with the introduction of social aspects. HeartMath has also announced that new Lightning dongles for the earclip sensor will be available at the end of this month.

Narrated running is probably the best way to describe the new Story Running feature embedded in Runtastic’s updated app, but the outfit’s new Libra scale is more interesting.

A year and a half ago, Bob Shor’s diabetic dad asked him if he had seen his dad take his insulin. Bob’s answer, “No, I didn’t see you take your meds” was interpreted by his father as “No, you haven’t taken them.” His dad overdosed that day, which Bob says was the reason he and his brother Rotem created MediSafe, a collaborative app that helps keep track of long-term medication.

The app will remind users when it’s time to take meds, and display dosage and an image of what the meds actually look like. There’s even a refill reminder and personalized information and details about taking the drug and effects. But the big feature is the app’s collaborative nature.

It seems to me that we do a lot of unnecessary worrying in our lives. There’s a lot of generalized anxiety floating out there, and–absent a clinical diagnosis of anxiety–perhaps we could all benefit from keeping track of what we worry about, and how often. If nothing else, it’s a good way to figure out whether we truly have issues to stress over, or if we’re maybe creating a bunch of it for our own need to feel worried.

In addition, we might also have some moments when we realize that our worries are nothing more than irrational fears of our own making. The problem is, we forget these moments when gripped by worry again the next time.

The developer behind iOS app Worry Watch has created a gorgeous and useful way to track our anxious moments as well as the moments when we realize that our worries might be irrational.

According to all the fashionable studies these days, sitting is about as dangerous as balancing a TV set on the edge of the bathtub while you have a soak, sip a martini and smoke a fat Havana all at the same time.

I avoid this deathtrap by doing my work as fast as possible and then going back to bed after a couple of hours spent in the danger zone, but apparently standing desks are another good solution. And if you own a Mac, then you’ll want a standing desk designed to work with it, like the new WorkFit for Apple range from Ergotron.

Zensorium’s Tinke is one of those gadgets that’s a little off the beaten path. Like many fitness gadgets, it can measure heart rate. What makes it different is that it’ll also measure blood oxygen levels and respiratory rate — and what it does with that data is even more unusual.

It’s not exactly the belle of the ball, and its name is in serious need of some marketing help; but the LifeTrak Move C300 activity tracker makes up for its lack of charm with some powerful bonus features, like waterproofness (to 90 feet!) and the ability to also measure heart rate.

On top of all that, the device’s energy requirements are so low that its coin-sized, non-rechargeable battery will last a year.

At this point, Withings has to be the most complete biometric suite in existence outside of a hospital or Langley. The outfit began with a scale (which also measures body-fat percentage), added a separate blood pressure cuff and then snuck an air-quality sensor and a pulse meter into their scale.

The latest addition is the a wearable activity tracker that adds a feature unique, at this point, to activity trackers: a pulse meter (which explains why they’ve named it the Pulse).

The FDA has gone after Biosense, a health startup that makes uCheck, an automated urine analyzer sold directly to end customers. You pee on a strip then use the uChek iPhone app to take a picture and analyze the contents of your urine for health info like glucose. Biosense claims that it can help detect up to 25 diseases, like diabetes, pre-clampsia, and urinary tract infection.

A letter has been sent to Biosense from FDA about its home kit + iPhone app product asking why Biosense hasn’t gotten uCheck officially sanctioned by the government.

Science! A 14-year-old girl has discovered that a regular old iPad Smart Cover can “accidentally turn off” a person’s implantable deibrillator… a device that might be the only thing keeping them alive.

The French were everywhere at this year’s CES, measuring everything. Everything. The most imaginative expression of this peculiar (but useful) French obsession was the Hapifork, a Bluetooth-connected utensil that measures the user’s eating habits.

If that sounds interesting, good news: Hapifork has finally made it to Kickstarter, just two months behind schedule.

Withings, the mobile-connected health-monitoring people, have just announced a brand new bathroom scale. Only this isn’t just another scale that’ll Tweet your weight to a disinterested world. It has hookups to monitor not just your body, but also the home you live in.

It’s taken three years, but HeartMath has finally responded, in the form of a major redesign, to the concerns we (and probably other critics) voiced over their original emWave stress-management gadget.

Where the emWave required plugging in to a USB port and cost $300, their new Inner Balance system works with pretty much any 30-pin iDevice and sells for just $99.

Moves is that rare thing on the modern App Store — a free app that has an enormous amount to offer. It’s magical in its simplicity, an app that asks no more than you switch it on and forget about it.

All you have to do is carry on with life. Moves tracks your movements, intelligently works out whether you’ve been walking, running, cycling or using transport of some kind, and provides you with a helpful summary at the end of each and every day.

Best of all, though, it does so without any need for input from you. You don’t have to tell it that you’re going out for a run. You don’t have to tell it you’re walking from A to B.

It just knows.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – After four trips to CES, it’s not often I find a gadget that ambushes me straight out of left field; this one comes from the bleachers. And judging by all the buzz that’s erupted at the show and on the blogosphere about this ungainly Bluetooth utensil variously referred to as the HAPIfork, HapiFork or Hapifork (we went with the latter), I’m not the only one.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Our own Charie Sorrel wasn’t a huge fan of the BodyMedia Fit Link activity tracker when he reviewed it a few months back; negatives ranged from a user-unfriendly app interface and just the overall gawkiness of the device itself. BodyMedia has listened, and addressed at least one of those issues with a smaller, sleeker version of the Core called the Core 2 — and it’ll even allow you to pop the four-sensor device into elegant jewelry designed to accept the, well, core of the gadget.

LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Withings has now added a heart-rate monitor and an air-quality sensor into their WiFi Body Scale, which previously just measured weight and body-fat percentage. In fact, their scale now has so many sensors, they’re not even calling it a scale anymore.

The Larklife fitness gadget doesn’t just lifelessly track all the mundane details of your life, like calories burned, miles trudged and hours snoozed away. No, this little thing actually learns your habits and tells you, in realtime, exactly what you should do to make yourself healthier.

MapMyWalk is one of a range of apps from the people at MapMyFitness. It’s not a pretty app, but mapping walks doesn’t have to be pretty to be functional. And it is functional. Mostly.

It’s no real secret that bring your own device (BYOD) programs and the explosion of iPhones, iPads, and other mobile devices in the workplace have begun changing how we work, how we view work as a part of lives, and how much we work out of the office. A study earlier this year concluded that the average American worker using mobile technologies works seven hours outside of the office (essentially one business day) every week. A more recent study indicated some mobile professionals work even more – up to 20 hours each – during off hours thanks to BYOD programs.

One of the impacts this has one iPhone and iPad-toting professionals is a disruption from the traditional work/life balance that can make hard to fully “switch off” at the end of the day. Now there’s evidence that such a disruption can have a physical as well as a psychological impact on the human body.

By huge coincidence, I downloaded the brand new Withings app moments after its launch, almost by accident. The new app, which is iPhone-only (or pixel-doubled on the iPad) until a future update arrives), does a much nicer job than the old one of tying together the data from Withings’ various health devices, and remains completely free.

I bet you didn’t consider this feature when deciding between an iPhone 4S and an Android device such as the Galaxy S III. The company behind the radiation measurement app Tawkon has released a semi-disturbing infograph (which can be found at the bottom of this post) detailing the SAR (a measure of the rate at which energy is absorbed by the body when exposed to a radio frequency(RF) electromagnetic field) score of various popular smartphones.