It’s got to be difficult to carry the fame that the Apple iPod enjoys without getting some bad press once in a while. A couple months ago we saw that the player can adversely affect pacemakers, and today an article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine stating that wearing your iPod in a Thunderstorm might not be the best idea.

The report cited a case at a hospital in Canada where a man was out jogging during a thunderstorm when lightning struck a tree that was next to him. As a result, the man was thrown about 8 feet, suffered some burns, a jaw fracture and blown out eardrums.

The physicians that treated the man concluded that the injuries he sustained were due to the iPod he was wearing. The burns were found on his …

It’s not exactly a glove and I don’t know if I’d classify it as a watch either, but it is something new that will be shown off at the Wearables Technologies Congress in Munich, Germany this month. This exercise gadget is like a second skin according to Beurer, the makers of the device. It wears on your wrist and hand similar to a glove and monitors your pulse without the need for a chest belt like most heart rate monitors.

Instead of reading the electric pulses from your heart, this this pulse monitoring glove uses plethysmography to detect your hear rate. This makes a simple, one-piece device that athletes can use to monitor their heart rate during exercise. The only downside to this device compared to the more traditional monitors that pick up a wireless signal from the belt is that exercise …

Ask anyone that is a diabetic how much fun it is to test their blood throughout the day, poking their self, drawing blood and then placing it on a sensor to see whether you need to boost or lower their blood sugar level. No kidding, it’s no one’s idea of fun. So why isn’t the Lima, a concept design for a outdoor blood sugar analyzer created by Damian Mackiewicz, already a reality and not just a sketch?

According to Mackiewicz’s notes the Lima works by sensing the blood sugar level just by resting your hand on the surface of the unit. The Lima can then detect what the level is in your blood through infrared radiation. There is no irritating pinprick and you don’t need to draw blood. With over six million people alone suffering from diabetes in Germany (which we guess is …

Measuring your pets body fat isn’t always as easy as lining the paws up on a body fat meter for people but having an overweight (or underweight) pet can be an issue and something you might want to keep tabs on.

This Kao Dog Body Fat measuring gadget for dogs is painless and works by being placed on pre-defined areas of your pets back. It measures the percent of body fat and shows it on a digital LCD screen to compare against the ideal amount of body fat for your pet depending on where you measure.

Once you get the right diet figured out for your dog you can use your automatic pet feeder to dole out the right amount of food and keep a remote eye on his eating habits.

via Ubergizmo

Those Canadians are always thinking, and according to an article on the Beeradvocate they are now brewing a beer that promises to lower cholesterol. Why waste time and money buying both beer and medicine for your high cholesterol when you can take care of both at once?

Last week this Heart Start Premium Light Beer was launched in the U.S. containing two special ingredients that the FDA concluded reduces total cholesterol. The special items are 1 gram of barley beta glucan and 1 gram of plant sterols. According to a study at the U. of California, Davis, subjects given 1 gram of plant sterols twice daily for an eight-week period resulted in total cholesterol reduced by around 8 percent. Beta glucan itself is clinically proven to to reduce cholesterol and provides help in managing blood glucose levels.

No word on the actual …

Of all the rooms in your house that could suffer from a lack of Hello Kitty paraphernalia, you can rest assured that Hello Kitty can help it from being your bathroom. Tanita manufactures a wide range of quality scales and body composition monitors and it looks as if they’ve got a Hello Kitty branded version as well.

The Hello Kitty Body Fat Monitor (model BF-071-KT) shown here uses bioelectric impedance analysis when stepping onto the pads to measure what percentage of your body is made up of fat, and of course it also measures your weight. Aside from body fat monitors being kind of cool, the scale itself is not anything special compared to the Hello Kitty health-conscious “An apple a day..” slogan that you get to look down at every morning.

The Hello Kitty body fat monitor runs about $49, …

The Discovery Channel store advertises this special blue light as a natural remedy to help you go to sleep at night. The Twilight blue light therapy sleep system exposes your body to the soothing powers of blue light in order to re-calibrate a persons Circadian rhythm, that is if you truly want your rhythm re-calibrated.

Turn on the Twilight Mini blue light about 30 to 60 minutes before you hit the sack and the translucent lens will deliver to you the right amount of UV-free light for a total of up to 10,000 hours from one bulb. The Twilight blue light promises to help you fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly once you do, all for the un-cheap price of $89.95.

Discovery via Red Ferret

Here’s a chair you might find worth adding to your home media room layout. The Inada W.1 Massage Chair, claims its manufacturer, is the world’s first massage chair which synchs music and sound from a home entertainment system with massage.

The chair, which has a built-in amplifier as well as speakers integrated into the head rest, connects to your home entertainment system. It takes the music and sound playing from that system and tries to time the massage to the bass range, while also doing tapping and back vibration for the treble range and leg vibration. It comes complete with up and down buttons to adjust the bass and treble levels and is designed to provide you “deeper mental relaxation.” I’m not sure about that last part though – can you imagine trying to relax as an action scene from a movie like Miami Vice …

Pulse oximetry is definitely not a new technology, and even small, finger-sized portable pulse oximeters have been around for a while. But few have had such a clear display and been as reasonably priced as a the Oxicheck.

This device, like any oximeter shines red and infrared light into your finger to noninvasively check your blood oxygen level and heart rate. It has a nice large LCD display that shows and continuously monitors (not records) your heart rate and blood oxygen saturation in real time. This works off the same principals of larger pulse oximeters that you would find in a hospital.

It’s compact and lets you take it with you just about anywhere running on batteries and needing no cords. It’s a handy gadget to keep tabs on your own health, but don’t let it replace getting checked out by your health care professional. …

Hours of coding or playing EverQuest and lack of exercise commonly go hand in hand to promote growth of the waistline of sedentary computer users (like myself). This can usually lead to bad health problems down the road with various parts of your body such as your ticker. Designer Kawok Lau thinks the answer to salvation might lie in your mouse.

That’s right – your computer mouse. Lau has cooked up what is being called the Heartbeat Indicator Mouse. This regular, wireless mouse activates when a person goes to use it by calling upon built-in sensors below the thumb and palm to take one’s heartbeat. The results of your pulse are displayed on a USB device with a LCD screen which you can position on your desktop so you see exactly how often someone’s annoying email spikes your heart rate. This same display will tell you how …

According to a recent study, iPod music players can cause implanted cardiac pacemakers to malfunction and produce false reading while monitoring heart rhythms. The study was done by a 17-year-old Michigan high school student in conjunction with a team from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, and presented to the Hearth Rhythm Society’s annual session in Denver.

In the study no other portable music players were used, only iPods. After testing 83 individuals with pacemakers by holding the iPod device 2 inches in front of the subjects chest for 5 to 10 seconds, almost half of the pacemakers produced electrical interference causing the device to either misread the heart’s function or to not read any heart function at all. In one instance the pacemaker stopped functioning completely. We have to wonder if the same results would …

Usually when you or your doctor take your pulse you would use a blood pressure cuff, a clip on one of your fingers or even just counting the beats on your neck the old fashioned way. Taylor Gifts is bringing the pulse counting business into the 21st century with its heart rate monitor ring so you can always tell what your rate is with just a quick glance.

While its bright red design won’t win any style awards it does get our approval for displaying your pulse in large enough numbers (between a range of 30 to 250 beats per minute.) If you want to use the ring in conjunction with an exercise routine the ring also features a stopwatch mode and a timer mode so after you do your workout you can check back and see what your vitals are like.

The FDA approved …

Tanita, a worldwide leader in creating electronic scales, has come out with new scale that checks your weight and then some.

The Tanita BC-545 not only checks your weight, but uses bioelectric impedance analysis to measure your body composition. Now, scales that measure this type of impedance are getting more common and it really doesn’t make the BC-545 all that special, but Tanita takes it a little further to offer some pretty unique and cool features. This scale will take measurements of things such as body fat percentages, body water percentages, bone mass, metabolism rate, muscle mass, and daily calorie intake among other things.

What makes this device even more unique is the same reason Tanita prefers to call it a segmental body composition analyzer. The BC-545 can give readings from 5 different segments of your body – both arms, …

While the MindSpa sounds and lights gadget might not directly turn you into an actual superhero, even with the glasses, it is designed as a Personal Development System to help you become more creative, relaxed and rejuvenated which could bring you one step closer.

The handheld MindSpa uses lights and sounds that work together through earbuds and special glasses to provide different desired results such as being deeply relaxed, or to induce a stimulated state of mind to help the creative juices flowing. The device has at least a dozen programs with it that target everything from boosting energy to optimizing performance or to help with sleep.

It’s difficult to say what type of files the $250 device plays or if you can upload your own songs, but then again some speed metal combined with the lights could very possibly send you into a …

An artificial heart that doesn’t beat? The Food and Drug Administration approved the first fully implantable artificial heart. The new innovative design is based on a pulse-free, continuously-pumping architecture. The ground-breaking design brings hope to patients near death from certain heart failure, although some problems remain with its large size and relatively short lifespan.

The new device is dubbed the AbioCor and is made by Massachusetts-based Abiomed. The AbioCor uses a hydraulic pumping system to simulate a natural heart beat. An alternative design formulated by O.H. “Bud” Frazier, a prominent heart surgeon, pumps blood through the body in a continuous cycle, rather than with the systematic beat of a normal heart. In Frazier’s continuous flow design, a severely damaged heart is removed and replaced with two rotor-based pumps that continually cycle blood through the body.

Bring on the bacon and the chili-cheese fries.

via …