Tag: ScienceDaily

Scientists have made use of seaweed to acquire biodegradable well being sensors, which could be applied like a second skin — ScienceDaily

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Scientists have made use of seaweed to acquire biodegradable well being sensors, which could be applied like a second skin — ScienceDaily

Experts at the College of Sussex have effectively trialed new biodegradable wellness sensors that could alter the way we working experience personal healthcare and physical fitness monitoring technological know-how.

The staff at Sussex have developed the new health sensors — this kind of as people worn by runners or individuals to keep an eye on heart fee and temperature — using pure features like rock salt, drinking water and seaweed, mixed with graphene. Simply because they are only made with ingredients located in nature, the sensors are absolutely biodegradable, creating them additional environmentally pleasant than commonly utilised rubber and plastic-based mostly solutions. Their natural composition also locations them inside of the rising scientific discipline of edible electronics — electronic units that are risk-free for a particular person to consume.

Better even now, the scientists located that their sustainable seaweed-primarily based sensors really outperform present synthetic based mostly hydrogels and nanomaterials, applied in wearable wellbeing monitors, in terms of sensitivity. Therefore, improving upon the accuracy, as the extra sensitive a sensor, the extra precisely it will history a person’s critical indicators.

The strategy to use seaweed in a overall health checking device was sparked when lead scientist Dr Conor Boland, a physicist at the University of Sussex, was seeing Tv during lockdown.

Dr Conor Boland, a components physics lecturer in the College of Mathematical and Actual physical Sciences, mentioned: “I was first influenced to use seaweed in the lab after watching MasterChef all through lockdown. Seaweed, when utilized to thicken deserts, offers them a gentle and bouncy construction — favored by vegans and vegetarians as an substitute to gelatin. It received me pondering: “what if we could do that with sensing technologies?.”

“For me, a single of the most enjoyable aspects to this growth is that we have a sensor that is both equally totally biodegradable and extremely helpful. The mass production of unsustainable rubber and plastic dependent wellness technological know-how could, ironically, pose a chance to human overall health by way of microplastics leeching into h2o sources as they degrade.

“As a new guardian, I see it as my accountability to make sure my exploration allows the realisation of a cleaner earth for all our young children.”

Seaweed is initial and foremost an insulator, but by adding a vital amount of money of graphene to a seaweed combination the researchers have been in a position to generate an electrically conductive

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Majority (55.5 percent) were equally worried about the privacy of medical records, DNA data, and facial images collected for precision health research — ScienceDaily

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Scientists have made use of seaweed to acquire biodegradable well being sensors, which could be applied like a second skin — ScienceDaily

Uses of facial images and facial recognition technologies — to unlock a phone or in airport security — are becoming increasingly common in everyday life. But how do people feel about using such data in healthcare and biomedical research?

Through surveying over 4,000 US adults, researchers found that a significant proportion of respondents considered the use of facial image data in healthcare across eight varying scenarios as unacceptable (15-25 percent). Taken with those that responded as unsure of whether the uses were acceptable, roughly 30-50 percent of respondents indicated some degree of concern for uses of facial recognition technologies in healthcare scenarios. Whereas using facial image data in some cases — such as to avoid medical errors, for diagnosis and screening, or for security — was acceptable to the majority, more than half of respondents did not accept or were uncertain about healthcare providers using this data to monitor patients’ emotions or symptoms, or for health research.

In the biomedical research setting, most respondents were equally worried about the use of medical records, DNA data and facial image data in a study.

While respondents were a diverse group in terms of age, geographic region, gender, racial and ethnic background, educational attainment, household income, and political views, their perspectives on these issues did not differ by demographics. Findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Our results show that a large segment of the public perceives a potential privacy threat when it comes to using facial image data in healthcare,” said lead author Sara Katsanis, who heads the Genetics and Justice Laboratory at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and is a Research Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “To ensure public trust, we need to consider greater protections for personal information in healthcare settings, whether it relates to medical records, DNA data, or facial images. As facial recognition technologies become more common, we need to be prepared to explain how patient and participant data will be kept confidential and secure.”

Senior author Jennifer K. Wagner, Assistant Professor of Law, Policy and Engineering in Penn State’s School of Engineering Design, Technology, and Professional Programs adds: “Our study offers an important opportunity for those pursuing possible use of facial analytics in healthcare settings and biomedical research to think about human-centeredness in a more meaningful way. The research that we are doing hopefully will

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