Thursday, May 11, 2017

Electronics to Maintain Medicine Level in Blood - Science

One of the lowest levels of problem in dealing with one's medications is trying to remember whether you take your dose(s) today.  The Rockhouse 'system' is to move the primary (i.e. blood pressure med) from DrugLocA to DrugLocB when I take the pill each day.  That small physical jog is enough to keep me tight with whether I did or I didn't.

Laugh if you like but concentrating on trying to remember is more likely to cause a problem since you can run yourself ragged that way.

Ed:  what's with this DrugLocA?

I'm trying to get jiggy with the pseudo-militaristic prattle in vogue such as POTUS, etc.  Oh, God, it's almost as good as the smell of napalm in the morning.

Ed:  never smelled that

Few did

Ed:  did you?

Nope.  Never claimed I did.


Ed:  since I'm the flunkie who has to play the straight man ... gee, Silas, is there a better way?

Funny you should ask since, yes, once again we can do it better with electronics.


Now, a team led by Stanford electrical engineer H. Tom Soh and postdoctoral fellow Peter Mage has developed a drug delivery tool that could make it easier for people to get the correct dose of lifesaving drugs. In a paper published May 10 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the group showed that the technology could continuously regulate the level of a chemotherapy drug in living animals.

Science Daily:  Experimental technology monitors and maintains drug levels in the body


A researcher holds a prototype of a biosensor designed to detect active levels of a medicine in the bloodstream, as part of a system to personalize drug dosing.

Credit: Soh Lab


Ed:  that's for chemo!

And?  More than likely it will work for any drug ...

but ...

what happens when there's a drug cocktail in-play.


The interested student is invited to read for further detail since the Rockhouse has never smelled napalm in the morning but we're not doctors either.

However, we're interested consumers and this might be the first wearable which brings high interest when it can, at a minimum, alert me to a problem with a medicine level gets too low and, ideally, intercede to correct the situation when it's detected.


Rail at the future as you will but it's coming anyway, just ask the Denisovians.

Ed:  who?

They were here once but now they're gone.  They looked quite a bit like us too and they didn't disappear all that long ago.

Ed:  they didn't have such cool robos

That had to have been it, mate.  Come on down and collect your Nobel Prize.


The tale of the Denisovians will be a bed-time story for another evening.

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