Giga-tronics (San Ramon, CA) offers the GT-8555A 100 MHz to 20 GHz USB Peak Power Sensor, which provides fully calibrated peak and average power measurements, with a high dynamic range and PC-based user interface. The power sensor delivers 20 GHz frequency range, 2,000 readings per second typical, dynamic range of –40 to 20 dBm...

The process of monitoring blood glucose levels through finger pricking is an inconvenience at best for the estimated 26 million diabetics in the U.S. It's no mystery why researchers have continued to set their sights on developing more convenient and less invasive methods of monitoring glucose...

A Microsoft Research Connections project proposes to develop a contact lens that monitors blood glucose levels for type 1 diabetes patients. Other non-invasive alternatives to the finger-pricking method have also been explored elsewhere — such as this tear-based glucose sensor from Arizona State University,...

A variety of silicon-fabricated devices is used in medical applications such as drug and cell delivery, and DNA and protein separation and analysis. In applications such as drug delivery from implantable devices, the silicon device structure must have superior precision. In...

Systems for monitoring vital signs while driving could help measure stress levels, among other health parameters — effectively "driving" the concept of multi-tasking to a new level. By integrating sensors into the steering wheel, scientists at TU Muenchen Chair of Micro Technology and Medical Device Technology (MiMed) have...

In yet another example of how medical technology designed for humans in space can also benefit humans on Earth, Radisens Diagnostics (Cork, Ireland) recently announced that it will be working with the European Space Agency to develop a blood testing device. According to the press release, the ESA contracted the...

In 2009, the first wireless pacemaker was implanted in a patient in the U.S., but there is still a lot of work that remains to be accomplished. About a year ago, Medtronic offered a sneak peek of a leadless pacemaker under development, and other medical device firms and startups have also announced similar...

Aneurysms can occur in any blood vessel in the body and usually cannot be detected unless there is a rupture or leakage. About 33,000 North Americans suffer a rupture every year, leading to stroke with up to a 60 percent fatality rate and permanent disability in about 50 percent of survivors. Now,...

Imagine a smartphone that could act as your counselor in stressful situations, advising you on how to measure and deal with stress in your life. Researchers at Cornell University are developing just such an application, and their work is just one example of hopefully many projects that will come out...

In the months after a heart attack, certain patients are particularly vulnerable to sudden death due to irregular heart rhythms. The problem is not a shortage of information about those heart rhythms, but rather, that doctors need a better way to sift through the patterns to detect danger signals....

Medical device manufacturers that collect and analyze patient data are developing innovative ways to integrate electronics and wireless technology into their products. These innovations often present new design and production challenges. That was the case for American TeleCare Inc. (Eden Prairie,...

Universities are a breeding ground for innovation, but in order for those innovations to benefit the public, they must progress beyond the theoretical or prototype level — which requires adequate funding. A promising development was recently announced in California: Five teams of scientists from the...

Thermal management of medical electronic devices and systems is now more challenging. Power densities continue to increase while product form factors continue to shrink. Simple thermal management solutions, such as passive cooling (adding a fan and heat sink), are no longer typically viable to...

Improved devices have been proposed for collecting sweat for biochemical analysis — especially for determination of the concentration of Ca2+ ions in sweat as a measure of loss of Ca from bones. Unlike commercially available sweat-collection patches used previously in monitoring...

Last June, Analog Devices wrote an article in Medical Design Briefs about the increasing need to engineer devices that provide healthcare in the home. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights one technology that fits into this trend: a small purse-sized device, developed by Awak Technologies of Singapore, that would...

Engineers are taking important steps toward a future in which skin-mounted electronics could monitor individuals in a natural environment and even offer the potential for human-computer interfacing — all with the flexibility and comfort of a temporary tattoo.

Finger pricking may be a means to an end for diabetics who need to track their blood glucose levels, but it's a pain — both literally and figuratively speaking. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity for a better alternative to the finger-pricking method is...

The principle of tissue microfluidics and its resultant techniques has been applied to cell analysis. Building microfluidics to suit a particular tissue sample would allow the rapid, reliable, inexpensive, highly parallelized, selective extraction of chosen regions of tissue for...

A cytometer now under development exploits spatial sorting of sampled cells on a microarray chip followed by use of grating-coupled surface-plasmon-resonance imaging (GCSPRI) to detect the sorted cells. This cytometer on a chip is a prototype of contemplated future miniature cytometers that would be suitable for rapidly...