Body organs can send status updates to your cellphone

For cardiac patients, too much excitement can be a shocking experience. If heart rate gets too high the implanted defibrillator in chest can think one having a heart attack and give a friendly remedial shock. But such nasty surprises could soon become less of a concern for people – by giving our hearts their very own IP addresses.

Dutch research organisation IMEC, based in Eindhoven, this week demonstrated a new type of wireless body area network (BAN). Dubbed the Human++ BAN platform, the system converts IMEC's ultra-low-power electrocardiogram sensors into wireless nodes in a short-range network, transmitting physiological data to a hub – the patient's cellphone. From there, the readings can be forwarded to doctors via a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. They can also be displayed on the phone or sound an alarm when things are about to go wrong, giving patients like me a chance to try to slow our heart rates and avoid an unnecessary shock.

Julien Penders, who developed the system, says it can also work with other low-power medical sensors, such as electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor neurological conditions or electromyograms to detect neuromuscular diseases. Besides helping those already diagnosed with chronic conditions, BANs could be used by people at risk of developing medical problems – the so-called "worried well" – or by fitness enthusiasts and athletes who want to keep tabs on their physiological processes during training.

Tied to an Android

IMEC's technology is not the first BAN, but integrates better than earlier versions with the gadgets that many people carry around with them. IMEC has created a dongle that plugs into the standard SD memory card interface of a cellphone to stream data from the sensors in real time and allow the phone to reconfigure the sampling frequency of sensors on the fly. The associated software runs on Google's Android cellphone operating system.

However, IMEC has eschewed common short-range wireless standards such as Bluetooth in favour of the so-called nRF24L01+ radio designed by Nordic Semiconductor in Oslo, Norway. "The problem with Bluetooth is that it will increase the power consumption on the sensor side," says Penders. Using the Nordic system, IMEC's sensors can run continuously, transmitting every 100 milliseconds, for up to seven days between recharges – a Bluetooth system would barely last a day, Penders says.

In the current design, the ECG electrodes are connected to a small necklace that contains the transmitter and battery. The next step will be to use an ultra-low-power radio transmitter, still in development at IMEC, to improve the stamina and portability of the sensors.

With around 18 million people in the UK living with chronic disease, "telehealth" monitoring like this is the way things are going, says Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation. Devices already exist that allow people with pacemakers and defibrillators to send telemetry from their implants via a landline to doctors. But using mobile phones would be the natural next step, he says.

Selecting Photos

Tip - select only the best of your pictures to show to others and leave the rest in the drawer. Showing someone every picture you have taken dilutes the effect of the best pictures and gets very boring.

You may want to show twenty pictures of little Johnny at the park because they are all quite good and you can't decide which are the best but, trust me, you will be better off making that decision and showing only the few good ones.

Presentation is an essential part of photography and what you don't present is an essential part of presentation. Follow the advice above and you will immediately be promoted from 'photo bore' to someone who looks like they know what they are doing.
Your friends and relatives will beg you to see the rest of the pictures, resist at all costs. If you give in to their demands, you can regret at leisure as you watch their initial enthusiasm lessen with each photo they turn over. You've already shown them the best, what do you expect?
This advice is not just for beginners, although old hands will probably have learned the hard way already. I have taken many tens of thousands of pictures over the years but, if I was asked to mount an exhibition of my best 100 photos, I would be thrown into a blind panic. As each new 'great shot' comes along, it moves the goalposts, and last year's great shots don't look so great any more. That's why this is such a great hobby, there is no finish line, even the best photographer in the world can still aspire to produce a better picture next time. Having said that, some of the shots I took over twenty years ago are still in my pile of favorites. Learning and improvement are not always linear.

People Watching - A Hobby For Everyone

At the end of a long day, sometimes what you want in a hobby isn’t necessarily something that will keep your hands and body busy, but more something to relax to, something to lay back and stir the mind. You’re not always ready to come home and throw down on the chess board or jump head on into a knitting project. This is how the majority of Americans and others around the world end up squashed in front of the TV on weekend afternoons or in the early evenings.
But what happens when you’ve seen all the shows? When you really just want to get out of the house and do something, but you can’t quite think of what?
Over the years, I’ve found one of my favorite ‘inactive’ hobbies is the sport of people watching.
Yeah, it really is a sport.
The great thing about people watching is that you can do it most anywhere there’s people! I’ll go to a bookstore, a park, a coffee shop, anywhere there are people just milling around. Find a nice comfy place to sit, maybe get something to drink, and station yourself in a part where you can maybe overhear people talking. It really never ceases to blow my mind, the kind of stuff you can overhear or witness just in a half hour span of sitting, plus it’s nice to feel the sun on your back, maybe there’s a little breeze.
Parks are usually the best, as there’s always people moving around, but you’ll be surprised how easy it is to find great people watching places. In high school one of our favorite things to do on a boring night would be drive down to the airport and walk around the terminals seeing who got off, maybe even striking up a conversation (this is better to do if you’re with a group, as alone it could be a little creepy. We would even go so far as to bring harmonicas and kazoos and start playing songs for people getting off their plane (yeah, we were a little weird, what can I say?), and some of those days are among my best memories of hanging out. Obviously the higher security these years makes airports a little less feasible, but try the mall! Try a busy part of downtown!
Sitting and relaxing and paying attention to your surroundings can be a hobby in and of itself. And not just a lazy TV-style act, either.
I’ve found people watching not only to be a great form of free entertainment, but a source of inspiration and creativity-waking for my work. I’ve always believed that truth is stranger than fiction, and the characters you will run into on any given day out in the light can often far surpass what you might dream up. People are just too unusual in their own worlds. Get a free piece of the fun! Take those ideas home and work them into a story or a screenplay, maybe try to paint from memory the strangest folks you saw. Overall, I’ll take the strange local talking aloud to a dog that isn’t there, or the group of muscle heads on an outing to buy new workout clothes, or just any of the strange array of individuals our human world has to offer over a rerun of Friends or the new episode of Lost any day.
The possibilities really are endless, and you can’t beat free!