There's nothing fun about wearing a medical device on your person 24/7, so Belgian nanotech specialist IMEC is trying to minimize the discomfort of those folks with heart conditions who require constant monitoring. Still several years away from a commercial release, the company's flexible, wireless electrocardiogram patch -- also capable of serving as a dedicated heart rate monitor -- sends ECG or EMG (muscular) data in a continuous stream to either a PC or data logger for later downloading. The 175mAh battery is said to last an entire day in regular mode or several days when collecting only heartbeat data, a boon to the active lifestyle crowd for which this product is intended.

[Via Medgadget]

A smorgasbord of new medical devices are on display through tomorrow at the International Modern Hospital Show 2006 in Toyko, Japan, and we're seeing some impressive robots get face time at the expo. Specifically, a lovable teardrop-shaped unit caught our, um, eye; the Muu Socia 3.0 is a brilliant social mediator that facilitates conversation between the care giver and care taker by adding interjections and livening up the chat (saywha?). This little fella is pretty advanced, too: voice recognition, voice synthesis, speech recognition, and even facial recognition aren't beyond its abilities. Who wouldn't want a colorful cyclopic raindrop around in case the small talk gets stale? And don't even think of turning your back on it; just watch it get a little jumpy when something gets in the line of duty.

[Via Pink Tentacle]

It's likely that many of our readers are vocal proponents of the benefits derived from robotics research, but how many of you would be willing to put your money a robot where your mouth is -- literally -- and let it crawl down your throat to explore your guts? While we would certainly never volunteer to be guinea pigs for such a nascent technology, a team of European researchers are surely going to have to find someone to test out their latest medical device: a small bot whose locomotion was inspired by so-called "paddle worms" (and which sounds very similar to a Korean invention we once saw). It turns out that mimicking their fleshy counterparts allows the wormbots to effortlessly navigate the slippery, elastic walls of human intestines, and equipping them with cameras would offer doctors a degree of investigative freedom that's impossible with traditional "smart pills" or endoscopic procedures. Sounds good, but we're gonna wait until at least several thousand people have successfully ingested these bots -- and more importantly, successfully purged them afterwards-- before we sign up to star in our own personal remake of Fantastic Voyage.