Although this application is not certified at present for use in health care by any regulatory body, “our study highlights the potential for smartphone-based diagnostics to aid in clinical decision-making at the patient’s bedside,” said Dr Benjamin Hibbert from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, Ottawa.

Researchers used the smartphone’s camera function to reach the conclusion, according to a randomised trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

“Because of the widespread availability of smartphones, they are being used increasingly as point-of-care diagnostics in clinical settings with minimal or no cost,” said Hibbert.

“For example, built-in cameras with dedicated software or photodiode sensors using infrared light-emitting diodes have the potential to render smartphones into functional plethysmographs [instruments that measure changes in blood flow],” he added.

The researchers compared the use of a heart-rate monitoring application (the Instant Heart Rate application version 4.5.0 on an iPhone 4S) with the modified “Allen” test, which measures blood flow in the radial and ulnar arteries of the wrist, one of which is used to access the heart for coronary angiography.

A total of 438 participants were split into two groups.

One group was assessed using the app and the other was assessed using the Allen test.

“The current report highlights that a smartphone application can outperform the current standard of care and provide incremental diagnostic yield in clinical practice,” Dr Hibbert wrote.

“However, while smartphones aren’t designed as medical devices, it is important that they are evaluated in the same rigorous manner by which we assess all therapies and diagnostic tests,” noted lead author Dr Pietro Di Santo.

IANS

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The device, called GPhone, is a portable glucose sensing system detailed in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

GPhone has two main parts. One is a slim, 3D printed case that fits over a smartphone and has a permanent, reusable sensor on one corner.

The second part consists of small, one-time use, enzyme-packed pellets that magnetically attach to the sensor.

The pellets are housed inside a 3D printed stylus attached to the side of the smartphone case.

To run a test, the user would first take the stylus and dispense a pellet onto the sensor – this step activates the sensor. The user would then drop a blood sample on top.

The sensor measures the blood glucose concentration, then wirelessly transmits the data via Bluetooth to a custom-designed Android app that displays the numbers on the smartphone screen. The test takes about 20 seconds.

Afterwards, the used pellet is discarded, deactivating the sensor until the next test.

The stylus holds enough pellets for 30 tests before it needs to be refilled. A printed circuit board enables the whole system to run off a smartphone battery.

The pellets contain an enzyme called glucose oxidase that reacts with glucose. This reaction generates an electrical signal that can be measured by the sensor’s electrodes.

The greater the signal, the higher the glucose concentration. The team tested the system on different solutions of known glucose concentrations and found that the results were accurate throughout multiple tests.

“An added benefit is the ability to autonomously store, process and send blood glucose readings from the phone to a care provider or cloud service,” Mercier said.

The team envisions one day integrating glucose sensing directly into a smartphone rather than a case.

The work is currently at the proof-of-concept stage.
IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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“What that means is that when you go offline and then come back online to read a message, that action is being logged.

“Those online and offline actions from both participants in the conversation can then be correlated to identify when two people are messaging each other,” the report added.

Heaton warned that this data can be easily collected on a mass level and then sold to third-party firms for advertising purposes.

“People with irregular sleeping patterns are, after all, excellent customers to sleeping pills manufacturers,” The Next Web reported.

The code could even be tweaked to correlate more than two people messaging each other.

Heaton was able to identify when users were going to sleep by seeing their first and last “online” statuses for the day.

According to reports, users actually can do nothing to prevent hackers from being able to spy on them, unless WhatsApp security researchers find a way out.

“Using WhatsApp, you can set the app to show your ‘last seen’ statuses to either everyone, only contacts, or no one, but no such feature exists for your online status,” the report said.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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The 24-hour hackathon, which was conducted between October 10 and 11, saw 25 teams participating in it from several colleges and universities from and outside the national capital.

In line with the government’s initiative to create smart cities and smart villages as future hotspots, the hackathon was themed “Smart Habitat”.

“The hackathon was a success with more than 200 student-teams registering for it, 25 teams being selected out of the lot and active participation by them throughout the show,” a statement from the BVCOE said.

Another “hacker”, Tanya along with her team from the Indira Gandhi Delhi Technological University also developed an app, and this one notifies the user of the food going stale.

”Food wastage is a menace in the country and we wanted to develop a solution to prevent it,” Tanya was quoted saying in the statement.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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First introduced in March as an invite-only programme, the “Family Link” app lets parents block or approve app download and also track what apps are capturing their child’s attention by viewing weekly and monthly activity reports.

It also lets parents limit device usage by configuring a maximum number of hours per day the child is allowed to be on the device and when the device is to be automatically locked out for bedtime.

The software offers more features on Android as compared to iOS including a “Restrictions” section that’s focused more on what apps a child can use and lets configure privacy and other settings, the report added.

Apple does not offer a way for a parent to set time limits, remotely lock a device or view activity reports on app usage.

“Family Link” can control any Android device running Android Nougat 7.0 and higher and select Marshmallow devices. On the other hand, parent’s device only need to have Android KitKat 4.4 or higher or iOS 9 and higher.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy Image

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All existing face filters are now available for live video feature on the app.

The “sunglasses” face filter is available exclusively in live video feature for the next week, it can be tapped to change the scenery reflected in the lenses.

After the live broadcast ends, the user has the option to share a replay to stories, or choose “discard” option and the live video would disappear from the app.

The Facebook-owned company would roll out face filters in live video globally in the “next several weeks”.

Even as Instagram is breaking all records in terms of user growth, Snapchat still has a bigger share of new users in the US but the advantage may not remain for long, a report said.

Snapchat represented 38.5 per cent of new signups globally compared with Instagram’s 61.5 per cent in August.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 and the photo-sharing platform has seen its usership grow to 700 million monthly active users (MAU) globally.

IANS

Picture courtesy: Alamy

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The Gender Alliance is an initiative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and was started to bring together civil societies, activists, academicians, researchers, media, and others on a common platform to advocate gender equality.

“Use of latest technology like a mobile app is probably the first of its kind in the country to fight child marriage,” Nadeem Noor, head of UNFPA in Bihar, told IANS.

He said the app offers innovative features that will give girls the confidence to stand up against marriage before they are 18, the legal marriagable age for girls in India, adding its unveiling ahead of the formal launch of the statewide campaign against child marriage by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday (October 2) was a positive development.

“If the state government includes the app in its campaign, it will help us popularise it down to the village level with the wide network of thousands of women self-help groups active in rural Bihar,” he said.

Bandhan Tod is part of Gender Alliance’s strategy to support the state government’s efforts to end child marriage and dowry.

“It is a rare effort of civil society, and the first of its kind in Bihar, to support the state government’s commitment to end child marriage and dowry,” Gender Alliance convener Swapan Mazumdar said.

The app was also lauded by N. Vijayalakshmi, Managing Director, Women Development Corporation.

It will be available on Google Play store and anyone can register on it with their details—name, age, block, district and mobile number. Mobikwik, a digital payment gateway, will provide incentive to users who download it.

If the SOS button is pressed, the registered mobile number and other details of the user will be sent to the Gender Alliance monitoring cell and civil society organisations, who will contact the user to get details and then alert the local authorities for action.

Given the socio-economic and cultural context within which child marriage takes place, the campaign will aim to directly and indirectly reach out to girls at the village and panchayat levels in all the blocks and districts of Bihar through technology.

Gender Alliance stressed on the dire need and urgency to match this commitment with coordinated strategies, action and resources to end child marriages as well as early marriages in Bihar.

It has also extended support of the hundreds of civil society organisations, that are part of the initiative, to the state government in its fight against child marriage.

“Bandhan Tod mobile app will complement the Bihar government’s campaign against child marriage,” said Prashanti Tiwary, Manager of Gender Alliance.

Since its inception last year, Gender Alliance has focused its work on gender equity. Keeping this in consideration, it has also identified child marriage as one of the four priority issues as it is not only a violation of human rights, but a grave threat to the lives, health and development of girls.

Till a few years ago, Bihar accounted for 69 per cent of child marriages of total marriages. But the latest National Family Health Survey-4 revealed that the figure has declined in Bihar in the last 10 years due to increase of education among girls.

Gender Alliance will soon come out with a ground reality report on the adolescent girls’ social, education and health status in every block and district.

“This in-depth report is likely to provide ready-made data for the government to use for different scheme implementations to achieve its goals in a time-bound manner,” Mazumdar said.

Gender Alliance has announced the Bandhan Tod award for journalism for mainstreaming gender in media and awarded adolescent girls with Bandhan Tod champion title to recognise their brave role in the fight against child marriage.

IANS

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The “Finding Home” app, developed by the advertising firm Grey Malaysia, allows users to simulate the phone of “Kathijah,” a fictional 16-year-old who fled persecution in Myanmar and is trying to make a new life in Malaysia.

Users essentially take over Kathijah’s phone, answering her calls and texts and scrolling through her photos. In one scenario, she gets a message from her brother Ishak back in Myanmar.

“Kat, r u safe?” the message says. “It was a raid, they found us. Had to run.”

Richard Towles, the UNHCR representative in Malaysia, said he hopes the free app will help people empathize with refugees.

“The refugee story is often a deeply personal one and difficult for people to understand,” Towles said. “We hope that this application will allow a viewer to walk a mile in a refugee’s shoes in order to understand what they go through every day in order to find safety.”

There are more than 150,000 asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia, one of the highest numbers in Asia, according to the UNHCR. About a third of them are ethnic Rohingya Muslims, identified by the U.N. as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, who are denied citizenship by Myanmar and chased off their land in repeated outbreaks of communal violence.

“The refugee crisis is everywhere, yet we are inevitably desensitized to it as it has been going on so long,” said Grey’s creative director, Graham Drew.—AP

Image: AP

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Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a series of apps called “WaitSuite” that test users on vocabulary words.

“WaitSuite is embedded directly into your existing tasks, so that you can easily learn without leaving what you were already doing,” said Carrie Cai, a PhD student who leads the project in a statement.

“With stand-alone apps, it can be inconvenient to have to separately open them up to do a learning task,” Cai added.

Among WaitSuite’s apps include “WiFiLearner” which gives users a learning prompt when it detects that their computer is seeking a WiFi connection.

Meanwhile, “ElevatorLearner” automatically detects when a person is near an elevator by sensing Bluetooth iBeacons and then sends users a vocabulary word to translate.

“WaitSuite” covers five common daily tasks: waiting for WiFi to connect, emails to push through, instant messages to be received, an elevator to come or content on your phone to load.

“When using the system’s instant messaging app ‘WaitChatter’, users learnt about four new words per day, or 57 words over just two weeks, the researchers said.

“WaitSuite” was developed in collaboration with MIT professor Rob Miller and former MIT student Anji Ren.

The team hopes to test other formats for micro-learning, like audio for on-the-go users. They even picture having the app remind users to practice mindfulness to avoid reaching for our phones in moments of impatience, boredom or frustration.

A paper on the system is expected to be presented at ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Colorado in May.—IANS

Image: YouTube

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Within the next week, users worldwide will be able to share where they are in real time on devices running both Google’s Android operating system and Apple Inc’s iOS software, Google said. The feature is part of an array of new tools aimed at boosting the effectiveness of Google Maps, which analysts say is critical to the company’s ambitions in commerce and transport.

The location-sharing feature is aimed at helping people find each other in crowded places, such as concerts and conferences, and users will retain control over who they share their whereabouts with and for how long, said Google executive Jen Fitzpatrick, who leads Google Maps.

“That coordination in that sort of last-mile moment winds up being sometimes more complicated than you might think,” she told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday.

Location-sharing features have sparked alarm among privacy advocates in the past. To address those concerns, Google will remind users both in the app and via email of whom they are sharing their location with. While the recipient of a user’s location could pass that link onto a third party, Google will advise people to use the feature only with those they trust, said Ben Greenwood, a product manager for Google Maps.

“This is not a new concept,” Fitzpatrick said of location-sharing. “This is about making it simple, accessible and giving users a lot of control and privacy.”

In the coming weeks, Google will also roll out mapping features aimed at helping users find parking and remember where they parked their cars, Fitzpatrick said. Ride-hailing services have also become an important aspect of the app, and Google Maps will have partnerships with 14 companies in 70 countries by the end of the week, she said.

Mapping has become a key contributor to Google’s advertising juggernaut, said analyst Bob O’Donnell of TECHnalysis Research, and the tech giant cannot afford to let the app languish.

“It’s an absolutely essential service for them to drive more growth in all of their key revenue-generating businesses,” he said.—Reuters

Image: Reuters

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