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Can tech replace painkillers?
Jennifer Kain Kilgore was 17 when she had her first car accident. A high school senior, she was driving with her mother and aunt for a college visit to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., when their car -- stopped on the highway in a line of traffic -- was rear-ended by another driver speeding toward them at 65 miles per hour. Her spine was broken in four places. Nearly 10 years later, history repeated itself. Jennifer was waiting at a red light when she was rear-ended. Her old injuries were inflamed while new ones left her with all-encompassing, shooting pain. Despite a decade bookended by accidents, Jennifer, now 30, nevertheless hit milestone after milestone. Through surgeries and physical therapy, she went on to graduate from college and law school, worked as an attorney in the Boston area, got married and published her work as a legal consultant, blogger and freelance writer, sharing her personal experiences with readers who connected with her personal story. But throughout all of this, she lived with one horrible constant: chronic, often debilitating pain. After her second accident, she made the decision to leave her law firm job and work from home as a freelancer.
Quell wearable promises to relieve your chronic pains
As expected, wearables are all the rage at CES 2015. And while most of them are about looking fancy and sending useful notifications to your wrist, there are also others whose goal is to keep you feeling healthy. Enter NeuroMetrix Inc.'s Quell, a wearable that attaches to your upper calf and promises to make chronic pains go away within 15 minutes of putting it on. Quell's OptiTherapy electrode-driven technology uses non-invasive nerve stimulation to make this possible, allowing it to provide "100 percent" prescription-free relief to anyone who uses it. NeuroMetrix says that Quell is capable of relieving different types of chronic aches, from nerve pain to lower back problems.
Quell: Memento brings heritage, block shuffling to Vita, iOS, Android
Quell: Memento, coming to Vita, Android, and iOS, has a long lineage. "You see, the game prototype was originally created on an Amstrad CPC computer, way back in 1993," writes Fallen Tree Games art director Lewis Boadle on the PlayStation Blog. "Having said that, it was very different back then – it was called "Last of the Smileys" and was a lot more 8-bit in style."Since that Amstrad prototype, the Quell series has grown, with two other games on mobile platforms. Memento is a series of 150-plus puzzles set in an abandoned house, in which you slide a raindrop to collect pearls, navigating other obstacles with various idiosyncratic properties. The elements are, in general, recognizable real-world things. "This would mean, we felt, that the player is able to establish the rules of play quickly, because they know that a pearl is valuable, or that a thorn will likely burst a droplet," Boadle says.
