Hand washing and sanitizing may come as second nature to most hospital staff, but for visitors and volunteers it might not be so easy to remember. PullClean is a smart redesign of the pull door handle that incorporates a hand sanitizer dispenser.

The built-in hand sanitizer reminds everyone going through the doorway that keeping their hands germ-free is important in a hospital setting. It’s simple to operate: just press the bottom of the door handle to dispense a small amount of sanitizer.

Door handles are known to be bacterial hotspots, so it makes perfect sense to put hand sanitizers there. Every time you go through a doorway, you’re prompted to sanitize your hands, keeping you and everyone around you safe from germs.

When the sanitizer dispenser is empty, it is easily replaced with a key, just like a public restroom soap dispenser. The PullClean includes software that tracks sanitizing rates by hour, day, or week. It tells you the amount of sanitizer left and when the cartridge should be changed.

The post Press to Clean: Hand Sanitizer Built Into Door Handles first appeared on Gajitz.

Since the dawn of science fiction, the notion of suspended animation – human hibernation for long periods of time – has fascinated us. We’ve pictured using it to fly to distant worlds without aging, preserving our sickly bodies until a specific cure is invented, or even to deliver tiny, deceptively un-fun brine shrimp “pets” to unsuspecting children. It’s finally entering the realm of reality as surgeons at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania prepare to save lives with a technique very similar to suspended animation.

The team would prefer to call the technique “emergency preservation and resuscitation” since “suspended animation” suggests a sci-fi angle to the study and they’d like to preserve (pardon that pun) the seriousness of their study. The technique will be used on ten patients who come into the hospital with serious gunshot or knife wounds. By slowing – nearly stopping – cellular activity in the injured bodies via induced hypothermia, doctors may be able to buy themselves just enough time to fix the damage. The half alive/half dead condition is similar to the stasis into which space travelers are often placed in movies like Planet of the Apes and Alien to stop them from completing their human life cycle long before they reach their destination – but on a much smaller scale.

To accomplish this, doctors will replace all of a patient’s blood with a cooled saline solution. When the body temperature is rapidly decreased, chemical reactions in the body slow to a crawl and less oxygen is needed to keep the person alive. They are effectively held in a state between life and death. Putting an injured person into this state buys precious time for doctors to fix the damage to the body and save the patient’s life.

Animal trials began in 2002 and the results are very promising, but the real challenge is using the technique successfully on humans. The doctors are very selective about the type of patient they will test the procedure on – without the procedure, these patients would have less than a seven percent chance of survival. Pushing saline through the body will cool it rapidly, putting the patient into a state of clinical death. But actual death is staved off by the action of the induced hypothermia.

Under normal circumstances, cells need oxygen to survive and function. When someone with a normal body temperature is deprived of oxygen, cells can survive for about two minutes. Under induced hypothermia, that survival period extends up to two hours. The surgeons will use those two hours to repair interior damage and then replace the patient’s blood, slowly bringing them back to body temperature and back to life. The team involved in the study is cautiously optimistic, noting that we aren’t yet ready to send a space crew to Mars in stasis, but that if further trials go well they may be able to save people whose injuries would otherwise almost certainly prove fatal.

The post Suspended Animation Could be Key to Saving Lives in ER first appeared on Gajitz.

In many cases, having surgery to remove a tumor means having to go back for another surgery because some of the tumor was left behind. This is because it’s very difficult to tell by sight whether tissue is cancerous or not.Researchers at London’s Imperial Hospital have created an intelligent scalpel that can tell if the tissue it is touching is healthy or cancerous.

The “iKnife” works by instantly sampling the smoke that rises from an incision. The smoke contains important biological information that can be analyzed within three seconds. If the smoke says that the doctor missed part of the tumor, he or she can immediately remove the rest of the diseased tissue. In its first study, the iKnife diagnosed cancerous tissue with a 100 percent accuracy rate.

According to the researchers, the iKnife can reduce costs to both the health industry and patients by reducing the number of repeat surgeries required. Plenty more testing needs to take place before the iKnife can be widely used, but at the moment the biggest obstacle facing the researchers is the cost: £200,000 (or $300,000 USD). The price will naturally fall once the trials are completed and the scalpel can be sold on a wide scale.

The post Miraculous Scalpel Can Detect Cancerous Tissue As it Cuts first appeared on Gajitz.

One of the worst parts of being in the hospital is having to stay in bed for constant monitoring – even having vital signs taken intermittently can be a nuisance. This wearable health monitor from Sotera Wireless lets patients go about their days without the hassle of being poked at and bothered by staff taking their vitals every hour. Just a little bulkier than a wristwatch, the ViSi Mobile Monitor straps onto the patient’s wrist easily for constant remote monitoring of their state of health.

The ViSi monitor constantly measures the patient’s heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and respiration rate – all without disturbing the patient in any way. The vital signs are sent wirelessly to the doctor’s or nurse’s smartphone, tablet or computer. The clinician can keep an eye on the patient’s state of health without ever disturbing the patient, and the patient can continue to move around more or less normally. Sotera Wireless has already gotten FDA approval to sell the ViSi monitor to hospitals, so patients should soon get to enjoy a newly-increased amount of mobility.

The post Touchscreen Monitor Lets Doctors Monitor Patients Remotely first appeared on Gajitz.

If TV shows and movies are to be believed, families of people in a vegetative state spend hours upon hours at the patient’s bedside, having one-sided conversations in the hopes that the patient will understand them on some level. According to research being carried out in hospitals around the world, the idea that people in a vegetative state are still at least partially aware is not complete fiction. Recently, a vegetative-state patient in Canada was able to communicate with doctors via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Scott Routley has been considered in a vegetative state for more than ten years. After just one year in a vegetative state, the condition is said to be permanent. Doctors used to believe that patients in a persistent or permanent vegetative state had no real level of awareness or cognitive function, but Scott Routley might be key in changing that perception. His doctors asked him to imagine certain physical actions in response to yes-or-no questions, with a different action representing each answer.

After putting Scott into an MRI machine and asking him questions, it was clear that Scott’s brain was active. He was imagining the actions that corresponded to the “yes” or “no” answers. And for the first time ever, doctors were able to ask a patient in a vegetative state whether he was in any physical pain. Scott’s answer, to the relief of his medical team, was no. While it is fascinating to know that patients in a persistent vegetative state still retain cognitive function, it re-opens the perpetual debate about such patients’ right to die. Perhaps in the future, doctors will be able to ask the patients directly what their wishes are.

The post Brain Scan Helps Vegetative Patient Answer Direct Questions first appeared on Gajitz.