Remember when you were a child and broke your arm and had to wear a heavy, hot plaster cast in the Summer? Your arm felt heavy and itchy, your muscles atrophied, you had to wear a plastic bag over your cast to shower, and, after a couple of weeks, the cotton padding inside stunk. The only good thing about it,...

Visual acuity (clearness of vision) usually is measured by an eye doctor using an eye chart. It measures the smallest letters that can be reliably identified by the patient at a specified distance. The traditional test requires the patient to look and report which letters they see.

The race is on to design smaller, cheaper, and more efficient rechargeable batteries to meet power storage needs. Now, a team of researchers at Stanford University report that they have taken a big step toward designing a pure lithium anode, which, they say, would greatly advance current lithium ion batteries.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued new draft guidance that would exempt certain Class I and Class II medical devices from premarket, or 510(k),submission requirements. If a device is “exempted from premarket notification,” then the FDA would allow a device that was...

A team of engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a tiny, low-power device that mimics a fly’s hearing mechanism, which could be used to build the next generation of hypersensitive hearing aids with intelligent microphones that could adaptively focus only on those...

A team of engineers at MIT, Cambridge, MA, have fabricated a new elastic material covered with microscopic, hair-like structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, they say, the microhairs uniformly tilt to form a path through which fluid can flow. They...

A team of engineers at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin have designed an optical device that, they say, may offer a fast, comprehensive, noninvasive, and lower-cost solution to detect melanoma and other skin cancer lesions, thereby reducing unnecessary biopsies. Their device is a probe that uses light in...

An international team of researchers from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and other institutions, have created an inexpensive diagnostic device that, they say, can be used by health care workers in the world’s poorest areas to monitor diabetes, detect malaria, discover environmental pollutants,...

When seeking chemical compounds with just the right properties to create new products, including medical devices, researchers can spend years of trial and error testing them in the lab. To aid researchers in this quest, a team of scientists at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at...

Chemists at Stanford University have developed a non-invasive technique using lasers and carbon nanotubes that visualizes blood flow in the brain, which could help provide powerful insights into strokes and possibly Alzheimer's disease. Current non-invasive technologies like CT scans or MRI visualize...

On August 13, The FDA issued a guidance for industry and FDA staff called “Unique Device Identification System: Small Entity Compliance Guide”. This guidance is intended primarily to provide information to the medical device industry, including small businesses, concerning FDA’s September...

Following surgery, a physician generally listens to the abdomen of a patient for signs of digestion before allowing that patient to be fed, in order to avoid a condition called post-operative ileus, a malfunction of the intestines. Dr. Brennan Spiegel, a professor of medicine at the David...

Defects in the head, face, or jaw, whether from disease, injury, or birth defect, can dramatically impact a person’s appearance. A team of researchers at Texas A&M University, College Station, report that they have developed a specialized material that can expand with warm salt water to...

Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, has designed a sensor applied as a temporary tattoo that can not only monitor a person’s progress during exercise but produce power generated by their perspiration that may be used to energize small electronic devices.

A team of scientists from the University of Surrey, UK, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, report that they have developed a new type of flexible sensor that is inexpensive yet sensitive enough to measure a patient’s breathing, heart rate, or movement, alerting doctors to any irregularities.

A team of engineers at Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, has developed an innovative method of using off-the-shelf 3D printers and materials to fabricate custom medical implants that can contain antibacterial and chemotherapeutic compounds for targeted drug delivery.

A new device that fits around the head like a halo, developed by a physician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a researcher at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, delivers therapy to quickly bust blood clots that could cause stroke. When ultrasound is typically used in...

New research has confirmed that a technique developed previously at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Gaithersburg, MD, can enable optical microscopes to measure the 3D shape of objects at nanometer-scale resolution—far below the normal resolution limit for optical...

Here is the latest batch of news from the medical products community. Please click the link for more.

XPRIZE, the global leader in incentivized prize competitions, announced the 10 finalist teams competing for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a global competition sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation for teams to develop a consumer-focused mobile device capable of diagnosing and interpreting a set...