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.

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