Health

Fitbit is working with Quest Diagnostics to see whether metrics like heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep cycles, and stress can be used to detect early signs of metabolic deterioration — a leading cause of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes.

The German Bionic Apogee+ is designed to protect backs of medical workers lifting patients out of beds and wheelchairs. It robotically lifts 66 pounds from lower back onto hips and legs, plus adds handles for patients to grab. Hours of use from a small Makita power tool battery!

Researchers discovered up to 100 times more nanoplastics in bottled water than previous estimates. Add that the growing list of places microplastics are accumulating where they really shouldn’t be — including babies’ poop, seafood, the Arctic, and Great Lakes.

At CES, Eureka Park is where you’ll find a ton of smaller startups and tech companies working on next-gen ideas. It’s also where you’ll generally find a handful of companies trying to innovate the way we pee. Toilet humor aside, there’s a lot of valuable information stored in urine — which is why it’s an area of interest for the health tech community. Here’s a look at three urine-related tech startups that caught my eye.

The company announced at CES today that its “Premium Teeth Resin” has been registered with the FDA and enables 3D-printed dentures with “life-like aesthetics” that mimic “natural teeth translucency and opalescence.”

I don’t know if this $249.95 Withings BeamO “multiscope” will ever gain a place in the culture that matches that of HeadOn, but combining a thermometer, stethoscope, pulse oximeter, and EKG all-in-one is ambitious, to say the least.

Consumer Reports is back with another sobering investigation into the bisphenols and phthalates — chemicals known as plasticizers — in common supermarket and fast foods. CR found that despite growing evidence that these chemicals ain’t too great for your health, they were found “in almost every food” at high levels.

This time, it has to fork over $740,000 after an investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James found “a long and burdensome cancellation process” in which the company kept on charging consumers even after they tried to cancel.

With covid cases on the rise, you might want to stock up on at-home tests.

In case you haven’t listened to the most recent episode of Decoder, Hsiang, who is now the United States Digital Service administrator, told us the inside story of how she helped fix the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov a decade ago. Read the full interview here, or listen to the podcast here.

And even if your state has protections, you’re still not safe:

The US Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of two gene-based therapies for sickle cell disease, one of which uses the genome editing technology CRISPR. It’s a big milestone, but access to the therapies for now will still be very limited and expensive, the New York Times explains.

Keith Berman, who claimed he wasn’t taking compensation in his role as CEO, actually splashed out a bunch of company money on himself. Also, he claimed that he could test for covid in 15 seconds. Also also, my guy used a “fake persona to repeat false and misleading statements to investors on internet message boards.”

The US government is once again offering a round of four at-home covid tests you can get for free. You can place an order directly from the USPS website, which will start shipping the week of November 27th.

Americans have a worse opinion of science now than they did before the covid-19 pandemic. It doesn’t come as a surprise after all the disinformation that’s been swirling around since then. Now we can see how much trust in science has eroded in the latest survey by the Pew Research Center. The number of participants who say science “has had a mostly positive impact on society” fell from 73 percent in 2019 to 57 percent today.

Bloomberg has a sprawling piece chronicling the history of Apple’s efforts to expand into health care. One revelation is this:

The DOJ was granted (PDF) a stay of an injunction barring DHS, CISA, FBI, and other federal officials from contact with social media platforms about content moderation. The judge who wrote the injunction this summer claimed their requests about posts containing covid misinformation amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says it “won’t happen” in 2024 and “possibly” won’t arrive in 2025, either. That’s not a huge surprise — my colleague Victoria Song wrote a piece in March about the challenges facing noninvasive blood glucose monitoring, so it’s not surprising that the technology might be very far away even for Apple.

The government just extended the shelf life of some at-home tests in addition to announcing it’ll offer them for free again earlier this week. That means you might be able to use the tests you ordered last year, even if the kit “expired” in the past month. Just look up your kit in this table and click on the “extended expiration date” link to find out how much longer it’ll last.

The Withings Body Scan Connected Health Station is an extra as hell scale. It’s got a handle for 6-lead EKGs and can purportedly take segmented body fat scans. As in, differentiate how much fat you carry in your arms versus legs, etc. Withings also claims the scale’s EDA sensors can measure your foot sweat to gauge your nerve health. Wild.