Zoll completes rollout of the sole CPR device indicated for sudden cardiac arrest - FierceMedicalDevices
Zoll has completed the rollout of its ResQCPR System to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on cardiac arrest patients. Seven months after the ResQCPR's FDA approval, it is now available nationwide, Zoll announced.
It is the first and only CPR device approved by the FDA to improve the chances of surviving cardiac arrest among adults experiencing nontraumatic sudden cardiac arrest, the company said in a release. Zoll and others sell automatic external defibrillators for sudden cardiac arrest, but that class of devices doesn't perform CPR.
A clinical trial showed that the ResQCPR improved one-year survival rates from out-of-hospital nontraumatic cardiac arrest by 49% over conventional CPR.
"The ResQCPR System provides intrathoracic pressure regulation (IPR) therapy, which non-invasively improves circulation to vital organs without the use of pharmaceutical or other agents during CPR by enhancing the negative pressure or vacuum in the chest," said Keith Lurie, MD, Chief Medical Officer of ZOLL Minneapolis and inventor of the ResQCPR System. "If implemented widely in the United States, the ResQCPR System could save thousands of additional lives from cardiac arrest every year."
According to a release, early adopters of the device included the municipalities of Memphis, TN, Oklahoma City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Cleveland and Chesapeake, VA. Zoll hopes other localities adopt the device, which is now available nationwide.
The ResQCPR is expected to improve upon manual CPR and consists of two devices: the ResQPump Active Compression Decompression CPR Device, which has a handle that attaches to the patient's chest with a suction cup and has pressure gauge to assess compression depth and timing, and the ResQPod 16.0 Impedance Threshold Device, which fits onto a rescue face mask or breathing tube. The latter impedes airflow during chest compression in order to reduce chest compression and bring blood back to the heart.
The device was inspired by a toilet plunger. Inventor Dr. Keith Lurie in 1985 encountered a son who used the (nonmedical) device upon his father when manual CPR proved ineffective. "It occurred to me that not only did the plunger serve as an effective chest compressor, but the suction between the chest wall and the plunger generated significant negative pressure to enhance blood flow back to the heart," Lurie said in a statement. He is Zoll's chief medical officer.
The ResQCPR was developed by Advanced Circulatory Systems. Zoll acquired the company in January, a few months before the device's FDA approval.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Augmented Reality to Guide Surgeries at a Distance > ENGINEERING.com
Researchers and engineers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine are developing an “augmented reality telementoring” system to connect surgeons with specialists across the world.
Telementoring is already used to allow experts to guide surgeons remotely using telestrators, much like what you see when watching football commentary. Annotations are laid over video of a surgery, but this can potentially divert the doctor’s attention away from the patient.
The new System for Telementoring with Augmented Reality (STAR) uses modern technology like transparent displays and sensors to improve the quality of communication between surgeons and specialists.
The STAR system uses a tablet positioned between the surgeon and their patient, held in place with a robotic arm or surgical assistant. A video stream of the operation is sent to the expert who, with a pad of their own, can create annotations and communicate verbally through the device.
“The surgeon sees the operating field, the instruments and their hands as if the display were not there, yet the operating field is enhanced with the mentor’s graphical annotations,” states Juan Wachs, professor of industrial engineering at Purdue.
However, there is still plenty of room for error with this type of system. With all the motions involved in a surgery, doctors can easily lose track of annotation.
In response, the STAR system uses computer vision algorithms to keep annotations aligned. This is done by “anchoring” annotations so they remain in the same location relative to the patient no matter how the camera moves.
Voicu S. Popescu, professor of computer science at Purdue, points out that other limitations are still in the process of being solved.
A researcher tests the system using a manikin-like "synthetic patient simulator." (Purdue University image/ ISAT Lab)
“The video acquired by the tablet will be warped to the view of the surgeon, which will require acquiring the operating field with a depth camera similar to the Kinect camera, and will require tracking the surgeon’s head,” said Popescu.
Furthermore, because the surgeon’s hands are between the camera and the surgical field, they sometimes obstruct the specialist’s view. An algorithm may be able to detect the surgeon’s hands and render them semi-transparent for easier viewing.
Further research will also focus on improving the robustness of annotation anchoring with surgical field changes, the anchoring frame rate and the transparent display simulation fidelity.
So far, researchers have tested the system using commercially available tablets, robots and even Google Glass, while performing common operating room procedures on animals and synthetic patient simulators.
“The study provides preliminary indication that the system allows trainees to follow some mentor instructions more accurately than existing telementoring systems,” Wachs said. “Data suggests the system can provide meaningful improvements to the accuracy of surgical tasks.”
With this technology, experts could bring their skills to isolated rural and field hospitals or military front lines where specialists might not be available.
The researcher’s findings are detailed in an
online paper appearing in
The Visual Computer and will see print in the near future.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uber's Insanely Huge Vision of On-Demand Everything | Inc.com
To appreciate the scope of Uber's ambition, consider the name of the unit that spawned the company's newest service: Uber Everything.
The service, called UberRush,
officially made its debut in New York, San Francisco and Chicago Wednesday. For a fee of about $5 to $7, bicycle couriers and drivers will shuttle food and other small packages around the city. The offering is marketed not directly to consumers like the ones that use its ride-hailing app, but rather to restaurants, retailers, and other businesses, including launch partner Delivery.com and a burrito chain called Blockheads. The tagline: "With UberRush, your packages travel like a VIP."
In the
scheme of Uber, it seems like kind of a minor deal. "I don't understand why Uber is bothering with this business," tweeted New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo. While the heavily-regulated, capital-intensive taxi industry made an obvious target, bike-messenger-based delivery is not considered an extremely lucrative business to begin with, nor one exactly budding with inefficiencies ready to pluck away. Competition abounds: Any number of well-funded startups have food delivery covered, and one of them, Postmates, is
making serious inroads in retail as well. Amazon and Google, meanwhile, are doing battle to create the delivery network for all e-commerce.
Going head-to-head with some of the world's biggest tech companies over 25 percent of a $4 burrito delivery sounds like insanity. It's exactly because Uber's ambition is so big, though, that it deems no opportunity too small. Just look what happened in its core business. Uber started out offering only black-car rides, for which it could charge a premium. Then it tweaked its model slightly and allowed a customer to hail not just a black sedan, but also, well, some underemployed guy's Prius--you know, its low-cost UberX ride service. Single-passenger rides gave way to UberPool, its even lower-cost carpooling option, which now accounts for a majority of rides in mature markets.
In other words, Uber has--excuse the phrase--disrupted itself. Making a profit on transactions in the near term is less important than building out the world's most efficient logistics network--meaning the most extensive one. Uber chief Travis Kalanick recently
told Marc Benioff he looks forward to a day when every car in the world is an Uber.
To Kalanick, bicycles and Priuses and Town Cars may all be just nodes, but delivery and personal transportation are very different businesses. Uber is still on the steep part of the learning curve when it comes to the former.
The Wall Street Journal noted that UberRush already lost a few deals with businesses to Postmates, which charges less per delivery--as little as $2.50. Most notably, Starbucks partnered with Postmates. Some fashion retailers who experimented with delivery via Uber
reported having bad experiences. Deliv, another delivery startup, is already working with Macy's and Kohl's to power same-day deliveries.
In
an interview with ReCode, Uber Everything head Jason Droege said the success of UberRush will be judged on traditional metrics of financial performance: "It's no longer an experiment...it's a business for us. When it's a business, you're worried about profit and loss."
That differentiates it from the whimsical test-runs the company always seems to be running, for "products" like
Uber Ice Cream ,
Uber Kittens, and something we'll call "
Uber Portlandia," or Uber artisanal-cocktails-via-an-old-timey-rickshaw.
At Uber, these customization ideas are left to local Uber employees to dream up, and local general managers to approve, so they are still a little bit anything-goes. On-demand kitten cuddling probably isn't a big part of Uber's future--but if Kalanick could find a way to make the logistics of kitten-cuddling more efficient, he'd probably go all-in on that, too.
Uber Everything isn't just a name, it's a strategy. And maybe it's just the start.