Johns Hopkins’ Sridevi V. Sarma, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded brain-stimulation therapy that an epilepsy patient would receive.
According to Sarma, “These devices use algorithms—a series of mathematical steps—to figure out when to administer the treatment,” Sarma said. “They’re very good at detecting when a seizure is about to happen, but they also produce lots of false positives, sometimes hundreds in one day. If you introduce electric current to the brain too often, we don’t know what the health impacts might be. Also, too many false alarms can shorten the life of the battery that powers the device, which must be replaced surgically.” Continue reading
In 1965, Australian medical device pioneer Noel Gray established Telectronics – Australia’s first manufacturing facility for producing pacemakers that were designed in-house. Telectronics was an innovative developer, achieving some major successes in the early cardiac pacing field, for example, Telectronics’ leads allowed narrowing the pacing pulse to its current nominal of 0.5 milliseconds; encapsulating the pacemaker in titanium instead of epoxy; using a microplasma weld to join the two halves of the pacemaker capsule; creating one of the first rate-responsive ‘demand’ pacemakers; and isolating the pacemaker’s battery in a separate compartment to deal with the problem of leaking mercury-zinc batteries. 
Sensors for Medicine and Science, Inc. (SMSI) of Germantown, MD was founded in 1997 to develop chemical sensing technologies based on fluorescence sensing.
