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Posts Tagged ‘Dementia’

Microsoft’s life-blogging SenseCam becomes the ViconRevue, coming to a lanyard near you in 2010

The months of 2004 were halcyon days for those hoping to capture their entire existences digitally. Nokia was talking up Lifeblog as a way to chronicle every action of every day, while Microsoft had a few SenseCams floating around, snapping random images twice a minute to create a sort of slideshow of your daily tedium. Neither went mainstream, but Microsoft’s option still has some legs, getting licensed by a company called Vicon and re-dubbed the ViconRevue. It now has 1GB of internal storage backing what seems to be a VGA camera sensor that can snap a picture every 30 seconds. At £500 ($820) they’re currently intended for those studying Alzheimers and dementia, but a consumer model is due next year, and hopefully it will be affordable enough for those with memories but no government grants.

[Via Engadget Polish]

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Microsoft’s life-blogging SenseCam becomes the ViconRevue, coming to a lanyard near you in 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Traumatic head injury? Weird Science prescribes vodka

Blow to head? Drink up!: You could probably figure out the topic despite the medicalese in the title: “Positive Serum Ethanol Level and Mortality in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.” The study is a retrospective one, based on identifying a set of patients in trauma centers who had been diagnosed with severe brain injuries. Not surprisingly, a number of them had been drinking. The surprise was that the folks with alcohol in the bloodstream had a better survival rate than those who hadn’t had a drink, even after correcting for some potential confounding factors. As always, further studies are suggested before we start dispensing vodka shots in the ER.

Balancing the checkbook as a diagnostic tool: Here’s another potential medical tool, this one diagnostic. Many elderly adults suffer from mild cognitive impairment, but only some of them progress to full-blown dementia. A year-long longitudinal study suggests a potential diagnostic indicator: basic financial competence. Anyone suffering from mild impairment wound up performing below controls in a test called the Financial Capacity Instrument, but those who wound up diagnosed as suffering from dementia at the end of the year did much worse, and had problems with financial concepts, cash transactions, bank statement management, and bill payment.

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