A person can weed about one acre of crops a day. This smart robot can weed 20.
Carbon Robotics has unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers.
The weedkiller challenge: Weeds compete with plants for space, sunlight, and soil nutrients. They can also make it easier for insect pests to harm crops, so weed control is a top concern for farmers.
Chemical herbicides can kill the pesky plants, but they can also contaminate water and affect soil health. Weeds can be pulled out by hand, but it’s unpleasant work, and labor shortages are already a huge problem in the agriculture industry.
3D printing is transforming everything from fashion and health care to transportation and toys. But this rapidly evolving technology, also known as additive manufacturing, can threaten national security and intellectual property rights.
To reduce illicit use of 3D printers, Zhanpeng Jin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, is developing a way to track the origin of 3D-printed items.
His concern was that, as long as people have the digital design for an item, which can be downloaded from the internet, sometimes as open-source material, people can print out anything they want, which can range from computer parts and toys to fully functional handguns and assault rifles.
Scientists at Osaka University, in cooperation with Joanneum Research (Weiz, Austria), have developed wireless health monitoring patches that use embedded piezoelectric nanogenerators to power themselves with harvested biomechanical energy. This work may lead to new autonomous health sensors as well as battery-free wearable electronic devices.
As wearable technology and smart sensors become increasingly popular, the problem of providing power to all of these devices become more relevant. While the energy requirements of each component may be modest, the need for wires or even batteries become burdensome and inconvenient. That is why new energy harvesting methods are needed. Also, the ability for integrated health monitors to use ambient motion to both power and activate sensors will help accelerate their adoption in doctor’s offices.
Now, an international team of researchers from Japan and Austria has invented new ultraflexible patches with a ferroelectric polymer that can not only sense a patient’s pulse and blood pressure, but also power themselves from normal movements. The key was starting with a substrate just one micron thick. Using a strong electric field, ferroelectric crystalline domains in a copolymer were aligned so that the sample had a large electric dipole moment. Based on the piezoelectric effect, which is very efficient in converting natural motion into small electric voltages, the device responds rapidly to strain or pressure changes. These voltages can be transduced either into signals for the medical sensors or to directly harvest the energy. “Our e-health patches may be employed as part of screening for lifestyle-related diseases such as heart disorders, signs of stress, and sleep apnea,” first-author Andreas Petritz says.
We do a fundraiser for the collection of support signatures for the admissions of the German Party for Health Research to the German federal election and to the state elections in Berlin and Thuringia. Those three elections take place on September 26th 2021.
Attention: According to the law, we are not allowed to receive more than 1000 Euro per year per donor from donors, who live outside the European Union.
Unlike in other countries, in Germany parties with 5 % of the votes or more get into parliament and can be part of the government (a government coalition). Also parties get funds from the state, if they receive at least 0.5 % of the votes in the federal election or at least 1 % of the votes in a state election.
The donations are needed in a large part to hire people, who help to collect the required support signatures.
The goal of the fundraiser is 45 thousand Euro. That is 3000 Euro per state for the federal election for our 13 state associations and 3000 Euro for each of the two state elections.
But even with less total funds we could still achieve a lot: If we only manage to get enough support signatures for the three states North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg for the federal election, we would already be on the ballot papers of about 51 % of the voters, if one assumes, that the percentage of residents equal the percentage of voters in a state. And if we would manage to be admitted additionally in the four states Lower Saxony, Hesse, Saxony and Berlin, we would be on the ballot papers of about 77 % of all voters (for all 13 states, where we have state associations, it would be about 96 %).
The deadline for submitting the support signatures is the 19th of July 2021. But we ask you to donate as soon as possible, so that there is still enough time for collecting the support signatures.
The German Party for Health Research promotes significantly more government funding for biomedical research to hasten the development of effective medicine against the diseases of old age. At the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on June 6th 2021 e.g. we demand in our election program, that 10 % of the total government budget should be invested in this area additionally (Here is our election program in German). Through the participation in elections we can do advocacy for our issue very efficiently and we give voters the opportunity to show the other parties the importance of our issue by giving us their vote. The more elections we manage to participate in, the faster we get more known, the faster we get more and more votes probably and the bigger is the chance that we will reach our goal faster. And the fact that this year a lot of people will probably vote per postal vote could also be very beneficial for our party. At home people probably look at the ballot paper more thoroughly than at a polling place and if they read our party name on the ballot paper and don’t know us yet, they have the time to search the internet for us, before voting.
The Art Of Human Care For Covid-19 — Dr. Hassan A. Tetteh MD, Health Mission Chief, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, The Pentagon.
Dr. Hassan A. Tetteh, MD, is the Health Mission Chief, at the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, serving to advance the objectives of the DoD AI Strategy, and improve war fighter healthcare and readiness with artificial intelligence implementations.
Dr. Tetteh is also an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, adjunct faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, a Thoracic Staff Surgeon for MedStar Health and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and leads a Specialized Thoracic Adapted Recovery (STAR) Team, in Washington, DC, where his research in thoracic transplantation aims to expand heart and lung recovery and save lives.
In the past, Dr. Tetteh has served as Chief Medical Informatics Officer, United States Navy, and Division Lead for Futures and Innovation at Navy Medicine’s Headquarters, a Command Surgeon for the National Defense University, and as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, assigned to the U.S. Congress, Congressional Budget Office, (CBO).
Dr. Tetteh served as Ship’s Surgeon and Director of Surgical Services for the USS Carl Vinson, deployed as a trauma surgeon to Afghanistan’s Helmand and Nimroz provinces, and has supported special joint forces missions to South America, the Middle East, the South Pacific, Australia, and Africa. He earned both the Surface Warfare Medical Department Officer and Fleet Marine Force Qualified Officer designations, and his military honors include two Meritorious Service Medals and the Joint Service Commendation Medal.
Dr. Tetteh is also an accomplished author, including the novel “Gifts of the Heart”, “Star Patrol” (co-authored with his son Edmund Tetteh), as well as “The Art of Human Care” and “The Art of Human Care for COVID-19″ (illustrated by his daughter Ella Bleue), and has published numerous articles on surgical innovation, health information technology, ethics, wounded warriors, and process improvement. He also serves on the board of directors for the Brooklyn, New York based Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health, Fayetteville, Arkansas based Champions for Kids, and Miriam’s Kitchen, a Washington, D.C. based nonprofit that works to end chronic homelessness.
Dr. Tetteh received his B.S. from State University of New York (SUNY), his M.D. from SUNY Downstate Medical Center, his M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, M.B.A. from Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, and M.S. in National Security Strategy with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence from the National War College. He completed his thoracic surgery fellowship at the University of Minnesota and advanced cardiac surgery fellowship at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Tetteh is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management, board certified in thoracic surgery, general surgery, clinical informatics, and healthcare management, and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives.
As the electronic health record grows in detail, the possibilities for customized care are becoming a reality. This article features some useful links to things in the making.
While AI is driving value in all aspects of our lives, there are times where it’s hard to separate the aspirations of those who want to use it to do good from those leverag ing AI today to positively impact real change in health and medici ne.
I have the privilege of working with many talented leaders and organizations that are truly making health and medical services better by harnessing the power of healthcare’s data tsunami using AI and other analytical solutions.
COVID-19, p art t wo
There is growing optimism in how we manage COVID-19 going forward to restore many of the daily living activities we miss and treasure. One of the good things we learned from COVID-19 is that, when faced with a challenge, health systems are capable of agile transformation. As part of this, we also demonstrated that AI could drive a “short time to value.”
Understanding the genetics of complex diseases, especially those related to the genetic differences among ethnic groups, is essentially a big data problem. And researchers need more data.
1000, 000 genomes
To address the need for more data, the National Institutes of Health has started a program called All of Us. The project aims to collect genetic information, medical records and health habits from surveys and wearables of more than a million people in the U.S. over the course of 10 years. It also has a goal of gathering more data from underrepresented minority groups to facilitate the study of health disparities. The All of Us project opened to public enrollment in 2018, and more than 270000 people have contributed samples since. The project is continuing to recruit participants from all 50 states. Participating in this effort are many academic laboratories and private companies.
Local health authorities in several parts of the United States are monitoring dozens of travelers for Ebola after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ordered airlines to collect information on people who’d been in several western African countries, including Guinea or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ebola is highly contagious and causes severe illness that often leads to death. Symptoms include fever, headache, pain and unexplained bleeding or bruising.