Smartphone app tagged posts

UV Sense, wearable technology that sticks to the finger nail, measures UV exposure and sends safety information to an app. Credit: Northwestern University

A Northwestern University professor, working in conjunction with the global beauty company L’Oréal, has developed the smallest wearable device in the world. The wafer-thin, feather-light sensor can fit on a fingernail and precisely measures a person’s exposure to UV light from the sun.

The device, as light as a raindrop and smaller in circumference than an M&M, is powered by the sun and contains the world’s most sophisticated and accurate UV dosimeter. It was unveiled Sunday, Jan. 7, at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and will be called UV Sense...

For monitoring heart palpitations, Anne Curtis MD and co-authors found a smartphone app provided comparable performance to the 14-day event monitors. Credit: Douglas Levere, University at Buffalo

Patients found the AliveCor app ‘significantly easier to use’ than ambulatory monitors. Throughout the 2-week study, 32 patients who had had some symptoms of cardiac arrhythmias, were required to use both methods to record when they were having palpitations. The UB researchers found AliveCor Heart Monitor smartphone app correctly recorded 91% of total arrhythmic events experienced by patients vs 87.5% recorded by the event monitors.

Patients were far more likely to be compliant with the smartphone app, the study found, with 94% of patients complying with the smartphone app versus just 58% with the...