Public health workers in Africa place HIV and syphilis at the top of their lists of diseases they see among pregnant women, and a new tool recently tested in Rwanda may help ease their diagnostic burden. The portable device, which plugs into a smartphone’s audio jack, performs three tests (one for HIV, two for syphilis) using just a fingerprick of blood, and displays results in 15 minutes.

In their report, the inventors estimate the tool’s cost at $34 plus the cost of a smartphone. They say it provides comparable results to gold-standard lab tests, whose cost they estimate at $18,450 plus the cost of a computer. 

“Lots of newborns are dying every year from congenital syphilis,” says Samuel Sia, one of the device’s inventors and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. “Should we be looking at new drugs for syphilis? No, it’s a diagnostic issue,” Sia says, noting that treatment for syphilis typically requires only one dose of penicillin. 

As for HIV, global health agencies have recently rallied around the goalof ensuring that at least 90 percent of people living with HIV know their HIV status. Right now that figure stands at less than 50 percent. Knowing one’s status is the obvious first step to getting access to anti-retroviral drug treatments. 

The new dongle draws all its power from a smartphone via its audio jack. It performed 41 tests when attached to an older Apple device; Sia says a new smartphone could perform many more before depleting the phone’s battery. His team ensured that the dongle would be low-power by doing away with the pump that often drives blood samples through microfluidic testing devices. Instead, the health care worker depresses a button to activate a vacuum chamber that sucks the sample through microfluidic channels, where reagents react to the presence of HIV or syphilis biomarkers. The dongle draws power only when it performs the optical assessment of the reactions, and when it transmits data back to the phone for read-out.   

Spectrum recently reported on dedicated diagnostic devices that are portable, cheap, and rugged enough to bring lab testing to remote African villages. Sia says his team initially built its own hardware and software, “but then we realized it was a losing proposition.” They decided to work off existing smartphone technology instead. 

That may be a good bet. Africa has been called “the mobile continent” in recognition of the many ways cheap mobile phones are transforming society. According to an Ericsson research report, Sub-Saharan Africa will have about 930 million mobile phones by 2019, three-quarters of which will be smartphones. 

However, the dongle will have to prove more useful than even cheaper paper-based diagnostic tests (based on the same principle as a home pregnancy test), which are already widely available for HIV testing. Sia argues that his device is more accurate and reliable, and can also be used to conduct many lab tests at once from a single fingerprick of blood. He also sees value in the digital record of the tests that the phone can transmit to the cloud for integration into an electronic medical record. “It’s all part of leveraging the smartphone platform,” he says.  

image: http://cdn.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/large-duck1.jpg

Photo courtesy of Craig Samborski

A 61-foot tall, 11-ton duck is coming to Philadelphia next month.

As part of the 2015 Tall Ships Philadelphia/Camden festival, being held from June 25th to the 28th, Draw Events is bringing the World’s Largest Rubber Duck to the Delaware River.

Based on a the plans for an installation called Rubber Duck originally made by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, this version of the giant rubber duck — actually made of an inflatable vinyl covering — also appeared at last year’s Tall Ships Festival Los Angeles. Hofman unveiled the first version of the rubber duck in his native Amsterdam in 2007; the first North American appearance was in Pittsburgh in 2013.

"In my estimation, you need to go big or go home," says Draw Events president Craig Samborski. "Then someone floated the idea of the duck past us." Yes, a six-story high duck floating by is big enough. Samborski's company bought the plans from Hofman, modified the specs — the version coming to Philadelphia is larger than what was indicated in the plans provided — and set out on building an 11-ton vinyl duck that sits on a 10-ton steel pontoon.

image: http://cdn.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/large-duck2.jpg

Photo courtesy of Craig Samborski

Here's how it'll end up at the festival: The duck has been pre-assembled and tested in Los Angeles. It was shipped to a "very safe place" in New Jersey in November per Samborski. In the next few weeks, the duck will undergo a test inflation with the local crew working the Philadelphia/Camden Tall Ships show. (Samborski will be living in Philadelphia for about a month to coordinate everything for the Tall Ships.)

When it's time for the show, the giant duck will be loaded into the Delaware with a 15-ton crane, then tugged to a spot in front of the Nipper Building in Camden. Each night, the duck will be towed back to a location at the port of New Jersey. It will be deflated for the night and re-inflated each morning.

Other giant ducks have captivated tourists; a 2013 installation in Hong Kong was so popular it led to a huge number of knockoffs in China. Pittsburgh's duck was similarly popular. But there have been down times, too. That one in Hong Kong deflated while on display (organizers later said it was planned), while a duck burst on New Year's Day while on display Taiwan in 2014.

In 2009, vandals stabbed huge holes in the rubber duck when it was in the city of Hasselt, Belgium. "The duck had just been repaired having been badly damaged in a storm and had only been back in the water for four days," Radio Netherlands Worldwide reported.

Samborski says this duck will not be able to be popped by a nefarious waterfowl-hater while on the Camden waterfront. "It's pretty hard to pop this thing," he says. "It's made out of a very heavy gauge vinyl. I suppose if you took a shot at it with a gun or a harpoon you could damage it. You really need to hit it with a bazooka — or maybe one of the guns from the Battleship New Jersey." Samborski has a "MacGuyver-like guy" on who travels with the duck and an emergency maintenance kit, but hasn't had any problems yet.

The duck has more enemies than just the Hasselt vandals. "Cities that cash in with Rubber Duck are outsourcing their public art, meaning they aren't doing their artists or themselves any favors in the long run," CityLab's Kriston Capps wrote last year. "When I see images of it floating in a new harbor, I can almost hear Rubber Duck whispering, in a raspy duck voice: The place you love is no more."

The duck does get results, though. Samborski says the Tall Ships Los Angeles festival drew just under 300,000 visitors over five days last year, even though the police forced it to close early on Saturday and Sunday due to overcrowding. "The LAPD wasn't really happy with me those days," he says. He says there was a $10 million economic impact to the area from Tall Ships LA last year. Though the giant rubber duck is not a particular or obvious fit for a tall ships festival, he says the attention it attracts is good for the ship owners, captains and crews.

"Several people warned me on the way [to the show-ending crew BBQ], 'Craig, there's some unhappy people there who want to talk to you,'" Samborski says. "I'm like, 'Oh man, this is just going to suck.' I walked in and, literally, every one of the tall ships captains was patting me on the back. They said, 'Wednesday we would have killed you, but we literally never had so many people on our ships.'"

Samborski gushed over the lineup for this year's Tall Ships Philadelphia/Camden festival. "This lineup of ships in Philadelphia/Camden is a spectacular one that I've never had at a festival before," he says. "And I'm not sure I will be able to have ever again." That lineup includes L’Hermione (a replica of the French ship that brought Lafayette to the U.S. in 1780), Barque Eagle (a 1930s German ship given to the U.S. as part of war reparations, and owned by the Coast Guard), El Galeon (a replica of a 16th century merchant vessel) and Gazela (Philadelphia's tall ship).

Tall Ships Philadelphia/Camden runs from June 25th to the 28th and will have ships on both sides of the river. It's being organized by four groups: The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation and the Independence Seaport Museum on the Philly side, and the Adventure Aquarium and Coopers Ferry Partnership on the Camden side. The festival will shuttle attendees across the river on the ferry. Tickets are as cheap as $7 for admission to both sides of the festival, or $16 for admission and tours of the ships. Sailing on one of the tall ships costs $85.

"A family can come and enjoy this event for many hours and not spend a lot of money," Samborski says. "And they can really have a quality experience — not just with attractions, but also get some education and history out of the deal."

It’s probably not good for the soul to think of life as a race to be won. But if you do accept that metaphor, you’d likely be happy to have McLaren managing your pit stops as you make your way along the course.

The engineering company is famous for building Formula One race cars featuring computerized engine control systems and dozens of sensors that transmit data to remote analytics teams. Over the last few years, McLaren first began applying lessons learned from managing race cars to managing elite athletes, and now it’s bringing its tools to health and medicine. 

Today at SXSW Interactive, Geoff McGrath described the origin and evolution of McLaren Applied Technologies, the business unit he founded within the company. McGrath also articulated three conditions that must be met in order to turn our bodies into high performance machines, with instruments and analytics helping us operate at our peak capacity. 

McLaren got drawn into human performance by helping British teams prepare for the 2010 and 2012 Olympics. “We understand data, remote analytics, and monitoring,” McGrath said, “but the real value is in the actionable intelligence you extract from that data.” His engineers embedded sensors in racing gear like skeleton racing sleds and bicycles, then fed the data into sophisticated models that examined the interplay between equipment, environment, and human behavior and physiology. Such models produced “prescriptive intelligence,” McGrath says, and could determine which design changes to a sled or bike would produce the best outcomes. 

After gaining this experience with Olympic athletes and their gear, McLaren next struck up a relationship with the UK rugby team, which is preparing for the Rugby World Cup this September. The coaches wanted to know whether training sessions, which include regular tackles, increase the athletes’ risks of injury.

McGrath said his team originally pulled out all the technological stops: They outfitted the rugby players with accelerometers, vital sign sensors, and body area networks, and used satellite tracking to precisely map their movements on the field. “But we were gathering so much data, it took hours to process,” McGrath says. “By the time we’d processed it the training session was over, and maybe they’d over-trained, but it was too late to do anything about it.” 

That experience led McGrath to his first principle of wearables: Instead of what he calls the “ham-fisted approach” of measuring things just because they can, McLaren tries to measure as little as possible, and ignores the bulk of relatively unvarying data to focus on the meaningful anomalies. “Let’s transmit the insights, not the data,” McGrath said. Using simple accelerometer data from the rugby players, the McLaren team built models showing each individual player’s typical playing patterns, and could then watch for changes that might signal the precursor of a serious injury. 

McLaren’s experiments in sports involved highly motivated participants, since these elite athletes were eager to improve their performance. But getting the broader public to embrace wearables and the quantified-self movement is a much bigger challenge, McGrath said. That brought him to his second principle: Wearable biometric gadgets must offer meaningful insights that typical people are willing to pay for, he says, and they just don’t do that yet.

In cooperation with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, the McLaren team is looking for those valuable insights in the medical sector. The companies are collaborating on clinical trials for drugs that treat disorders like stroke, lung disease, arthritis, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. They’re starting simple: Patients in these trials wear accelerometers and vital sign monitors to determine how their medications affect their mobility and general wellbeing.

GSK’s head of digital clinical trial research Julian Jenkins, who was also on the panel at SXSW, said such data not only provides a better understanding of how patients fare between clinic visits, it also reduces the burden on patients. “It seems incredible that we still ask people to come in to the clinic to measure something like blood pressure or pulse,” Jenkins said. It remains to be seen, however, if this data will give GSK new insights into its products and ultimately result in better treatments for patients. 

Even if such wearables do ultimately prove themselves in pharmaceutical trials, McGrath argues that biometric monitoring won’t go mass-market unless designers satisfy his third principle of wearables: “I think these will take off when they fit into things [like clothes and accessories] that we’re already used to wearing,” he says. He believes the technology in today’s sensors is more than adequate for our needs, but says their awkward forms prevent wide-scale adoption. Devices that require users to change their behaviors (even in small ways) typically get put aside after a couple of months, once the initial burst of motivation wears off.

McGrath said his company’s designers are experimenting with sensors that vanish into collars, earrings, earbuds, and other existing trappings of daily life. As those designers work for a company that makes some of the sexiest race cars in the world, it will be interesting to see what they come up with.