What Can We Learn From The Apple Heart Study?

Do we ever learn from our past mistakes? For many years we believed that technology was an inevitable force for good. It would give us instant access to a near infinite amount of information and allow us to easily and instantly connect with nearly anyone on earth. What could go wrong? The answer is that…

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Some Come To Bury The Stethoscope, Some To Praise It

Is the stethoscope still an essential tool of modern medicine or is it an obsolete low-tech vestige of an antiquated era? There is, to say the least, a wide variety of opinions on the topic. On the one hand, technology enthusiasts argue that the stethoscope should be replaced by portable ultrasound devices. “The stethoscope’s 200th birthday should…

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John Markoff On The End of Moore’s Law and Closing The Door on The Terminator

This is completely off topic (or is it?) but if you have any interest in technology you should read this fascinating Edge interview with John Markoff, the pioneering technology reporter for the New York Times. I am simply shocked that I have not heard more about the possible end to Moore’s Law (which states that computing power doubles…

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No, An Apple Device Won’t Tell You If You’re Having A Heart Attack

No one knows for sure but Apple appears to be strongly interested in adding medical applications and technologies to its current and future products. We know that Apple has patented a heart sensor that could be incorporated in a future iPhone or iWatch, though it seems more likely that it would be used for security rather than health purposes. We…

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A Glimpse Of The Future Of Cardiology, Including Star Wars Holograms

Goodbye flat images. Hello holography. Sometime in the not-too-far-distant future cardiologists may work with projected 3D holograms of the heart instead of images on a flat screen. And this is just the beginning of a technology-driven transformation of cardiology. That’s the vision of Mount Sinai’s Partho Sengupta, who delivered a widely praised technology-gone-wild lecture at…

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