“Access to safe blood in Nigeria needs urgent attention” said hackathon coordinator, Oo Nwoye, “We are using web and mobile technology to facilitate this, while raising societal awareness of the benefits of donating,”

In Lagos, we only collect 54% of the blood needed, and only 10% is from volunteer blood donors.

“In Nigeria, we are currently faced with a situation, whereby 60 percent of all blood donations are from commercial donors, 30 percent from family replacement and only 10 per cent are from voluntary donors,” said Nigerian Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu.

Surprisingly Today’s Google Doodle isn’t a prank. The doodle celebrates the 73rd birthday of Nobel Prize for Peace winner, Wangari Muta Maathai. The doodle places a painting of Maathai Wangari as the “O” in “Google”. She was well known for her efforts at sustaining the environment and keeping things green so there are plants in the background and the other letters in the “Google” serve as trees. She is also the first African woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Here’s a quick bio of Maathai Wangari from Wikipedia.

Wangari Muta Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan environmental and political activist. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In the 1970s, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. In 1986, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki between January 2003 and November 2005. Furthermore she was an Honorary Councillor of the World Future Council. In 2011, Maathai died of complications from ovarian cancer.

Don’t forget to check out other Google Doodles.

In what promises to be a great move for the league, Major League Soccer has announced that it will be the world’s first intelligent soccer league.
This is due to their plan to implement Adidas’ new miCoach Elite System (pictured here) across all teams in the league.
Having already planned an official debut for the system, at next week’s All-Star Game, they’ve now announced that the wearable technology is going to be expanding into the MLS 2013 season.
The miCoach Elite System tracks an array of instrumental player data, such as speed, acceleration, position, heartbeat and even the intensity of play — which is then pushed instantly to the coach’s miCoach-equipped iPad.

This is a great innovation for soccer in general as it will allow for more accurate reporting of player statistics as well as allowing coaches create better strategies and perform more in-depth analysis, hopefully leading to better player conditioning and improving the game.
Adidas didn’t mention when, or if, the Elite System will be adapted elsewhere, so we’ll have to wait and see how quickly more smart leagues start to pop up around the world.
What do you think of the System? Will you be watching the next MLS match to see it in work? Drop a line and let us know.

Source: Engadget

An international research team recently published a study that shows a positive correlation between the playing of video games and the volume of grey matter in the brain. The study which was conducted, using 154 fourteen year-old gamers, showed that the ventral striatum was larger in gamers who play more often.  The ventral striatum is a part of the dopamine system (Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released in the brain when we perform joyful activities.)

Could this report just be an attempt to reduce the amount of time kids spend on playing video games rather than studying or doing homework. Well, we doubt any matter involving the brain and its capabilities of addiction would be spoken of  frivolously. And With Modern Warfare 3 just coming out,  This report will most undoubtedly raise concerns among parents.

So Is it safe to say now that video games are bad? Well, not exactly! So don’t drop your PS3 pads just yet (PS3 >Xbox – but that’s just me) as the study only showed a correlation and not necessarily a causality.

Health professionals and the gaming industry are yet to comment on this story however. Perhaps, the brains of 14 year old gamers aren’t as important as Kim Kardashian’s daily workout routine?

Only time will tell.

Construction began in June in Kaduna, Nigeria. Development Association for Renewable Energies (DARE)  with support from London-based African Community Trust has built a two-bedroom bungalow completely out of plastic bottles. It’s earthquake resistant, bullet proof and fire proof. It also stays at 64 degrees fahrenheit throughout the entire year!

How did they do this?

There’s no shortage of plastic bottles on our streets. So they were gathered, filled with sand  and linked together by a network of string. The bottles were then laid and packed down with a combo of mud and cement making them stronger than cinder blocks.

Below are pictures of the house during construction.

DARE and African Community Trust hope to roll out more of these plastic bottle houses to help with the housing shortage and remove filth from the streets. Is this amazing or what?

Source: CP-Africa

The Japanese are at it again! And this time its at the dentist’s office. No longer with will you or your child be the lab rat dental students use to gain experience with the job, because they now have  ’Sex Dolls’. These Humanoid Robots are not meant to serve the purpose of sexual gratification. Rather, the technology with which these sex dolls were built with has been used to build the Hanako Showa 2.

The Hanako Showa 2 is a robotic patient built in Japan and meant for the sole purpose of giving dental students the job experience without putting real-life individuals at any risk. The ’2′ in the name suggests there was a previous model made, that unfortunately was not released. The robot possesses many human abilities, such as being able to open and close its mouth, blink, cough, sneeze, choke and move its eyes. And it looks very much like a real person while doing all that.

The robot was developed jointly by Showa, Waseda and Kogakuin universities and produced by Japanese robot maker Tmsuk. Unlike its previous model, which was made of PVC plastics, the Hanako Showa 2 was made to have silicone skin, tongue and mouth lining. These human-like body parts were made by Orient Industry, which is a creator of sex dolls.

The  tongue and cheeks were made in 1 piece by Orient to prevent water from getting into the robot and causing problems. The robots tongue and arms each have 2 degrees of freedom, which makes a total of 10 degrees of freedom for the doll. These human like traits input into the dolls machinery were put in hopes of giving the students the most life-like experience with treating patients.

Yoshida Dental Manufacturing, a dental supply company, will begin distributing the Hanako Showa 2 later this year for an undisclosed sum.

image source: (news.cnet.com)

If you have ever had to have your insides checked out by the men in white, you’ll know that it can be somewhat discomforting an experience. The usual is to have a tube inserted through your gut, via the throat or anus, but now there seems to be a less discomforting alternative.

Developed by a team of researchers in Japan(Ryukoku University, Osaka Medical College, and a private-sector firm), this alternative invasive procedure is a capsule that is swallowed and propelled through ones intestines and stomach with the help of a remote control. The fish-shaped capsule known as the ‘Mermaid’,  is 1.7 inches and is electromagnetically powered

Unlike previous capsule-like gut cameras of its kind, (i.e the endoscopy capsule developed by Germans), the Mermaid is maneuverable and remote controlled and can take two images per second following oral or anal  insertion.

According to professor emeritus at Ryukoku University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, the capsule is easily swallowable and should pose no problems of any kind.

Image source:  http://news.cnet.com

A five thousand dollar ($5000) reward challenge was recently issued by the children’s hospital in Boston and the Harvard medical school. The aim of the challenge was to push developers into being more innovative in creating health related apps. The prize went to an app with a multilingual EMR interface.

The winning team, the Meducation SMART app designers,  was chosen from a total of 15 apps that were submitted since the contest started in March 2011. The remaining 14 didn’t end up as losers as 6 of them got a honorable mention. There really isn’t a loser when it comes to innovation and technology.

The organizers of the challenge, SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies) tasked its competitors with developing a web application that would interface with an EMR (Electronic Medical Record) and be of efficient use to physicians, patients and health researchers.

The winning design, the Meducation SMART app, was developed by Morrisville.  Morrisville is a health IT firm that offers most of its services to under-served patient populations. “The app uses the SMART programming interface to obtain the medication list and then links out to a drug information database, which facilitates the generation of simplified medication instructions for patients, available in a dozen languages” (healthcareitnews.com)

6 teams were awarded honorable mentions for the apps below

Clinical Research: creates and interoperability between an EMR system and a clinical electronic data capture system.

Dx Social: Matches Patients with Doctors with past experiences in treating other patients with identical ailments

Medication Risk Maps: Helps identify and compare drug risks and side effects

Mynote: Provides an interactive patient history timeline, with disease specific schemes and allows for annotation

Priority Contact: This manages contact with patients after treatment and keeps tabs on new information relevant to their treatment

Rxinfo:  helps in identifying patients for clinical trials,  provides drug interaction information and a listing of nearby federally funded health centres.

A SMART app store is said to be launching in 2012.  All the other apps submitted for the challenge can be seen on Challenge.gov.

Picture: (http://blogs.hds.com)

If you are one to spend long hours on the phone or sleep with your phone beside you, you might want to check that act as reports earlier today from the World health organization (W.H.O) have suggested that cell phone users may be at carcinogenic risk.  In a report issued by the agency, cell phones have been put in the same category as lead, chloroform, and engine exhaust. This is news one would want to take with utmost concern, considering how important cell phones are in our daily activities.

For years now, we have been made to believe that cell phones pose no health risks. So why the sudden change of words? Have we always been at risk? if so,  why hasn’t the number of brain cancer patients increased?

The organisation is said to have recruited 31 of the world’s best scientists for a meeting in France to work on studies regarding this issue. According to the team, enough evidence has been found to state that cell phone radiation is “possibly carcinogenic”.

With the updates made to cell phones daily, the telecommunication device is constantly sending and receiving information through bluetooth, gprs etc thus putting us at risk of harmful radiation. However, studies looking into its potential for causing cancer cant be 100% conclusive at the moment as the cell phone has only been around for a relatively short period of time. Therefore, it would still take some years before its long-term effects can be studied.

Better safe than sorry-  I urge everyone out there to get hold of a hands-free device, could save you 10 years.

Image source: http://www.personal.psu.edu,

The application, which was updated mid-May, is available for just $2.99 at the App Store.

How does it work? You create a free account on Skineofmine.com. And when a skin condition comes up, upload pictures of the symptom unto the site and there will be online medical professionals of your choice (i.e nurse practitioners, physicians etc) on hand to give you an authentic diagnosis of your skin condition.

To make an accurate diagnosis, information is taken from a form you fill out. This form includes your location, type of sensation felt , family health history, texture of skin area etc. This, together with the pictures uploaded, can be used to analyze moles, acnes, vitiligo etc.

The effectiveness of this method of patient treatment versus actual in-person treatment is yet to be seen. But one thing is certain, it could come in handy when you are on a vacation, in the woods or just don’t have health insurance.

Would you buy this app? or are you just fine taking a trip to the doc’s office? let us know in the comment section below

Image source: http://news.cnet.com