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Scientists have claimed to be able to manipulate sleepers’ dreams by making them imagine certain topics, similar to lucid dreaming.Researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces used a technique called targeted dream incubation (TDI) to achieve this.TDI uses an early sleep stage, known as hypnagogia, to consciously shape what the sleeper will dream about.Hypnagogia – the earliest sleep stage – is similar to the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage in terms of brainwaves and experience, however sleepers can still hear audio during hypnagogia.As such, subjects recorded audio prompts, including “remember to think of a tree” and “remember to observe your thoughts,” and then had those suggestions played back at an appropriate time.Read moreUsing a hand-worn sleep tracker, which could detect multiple changes such as the wearer’s heart tate, electrical charges on the skin, finger movement, and more, the researchers could tell when the sleeper entered hypnagogia and could play the audio at such as time.The sleep tracker, called Dormio, “delivers audio at the correct times, and records audio of dream reports”, according to lead study author Adam Haar Horowitz.”Simply put, people tell us whether the prompts appear in their dream,” Haar Horowitz said. “Often, they are transformed — a ‘tree’ prompt becomes a tree-shaped car — but direct incorporation is easily identified.”According to the study, over two-thirds of subjects reports mentioned dreams that reflected the audio prompts.One participant described following a tree’s roots, while another remembered a tree from their childhood.However, as many of the aspects of dream manipulation are not understood, it is unclear to say how nudging a sleeper’s dreams could benefit them.”Every benefit shown to be correlated to dreaming deserves an experiment on whether it can be causally shown to come from dreaming,” Haar Horowitz said. “This ranges from past work on nightmares and PTSD to current work on language learning in sleep, or creativity and eureka moments in dreams.”Since that pilot study, a subsequent workshop was held in January 2019, in order to discuss new technologies for studying, recording, and influencing dreams. Moreover, the new experimentation guides dreams toward particular themes “at sleep onset”, which could then allow information to be incorporated into dream content.The results of this workshop have been used to publish a special edition on Dream Engineering for the journal Consciousness and Cognition.“Most sleep and dream studies have so far been limited to university sleep labs and have been very expensive, as well as cumbersome, for both researchers and participants,” said professor of media arts and sciences and head of the Fluid Interfaces group Pattie Maes.“Our research group is excited to be pioneering new, compact, and cheap technologies for studying sleep and interfacing with dreams, thereby opening up opportunities for more studies to happen and for these experiments to take place in natural settings.”

A new squid-like robot has can swim on its own and take pictures.The machine was built to explore the sea by researchers at the University of California San Diego.The robot propels itself by shooting jets of water behind it; it takes in a large amount of water into its body, and then compresses itself to blast it out behind it.The machine’s body is made of acrylic polymer, supported by 3D-printed and laser-cut parts; its soft body means that it will not injure fish or coral, and can also maneuver more easily than larger, more rigid robots.The ‘ribs’ of the squid are connected to two circular plates, with one attached to a nozzle for shooting water and the other carrying a waterproof camera or other sensor.The researchers decided that a cephalopod – the group of marine animals that includes squid, octopus, cuttlefish, or nautilus – was the best choice of design because of their speed.Read moreSquid can reach the fastest speed of any aquatic invertebrates, through a similar natural jet propulsion system.The robot can reach a speed of approximately 18 to 32 centimeters per second, which equates to roughly half a mile per hour – faster than most other soft robots, they claim.Real squid, by contrast, can travel at between 23 and 25 miles per hour.The robot also has its own power source so it can operate for a period of time without needing to be connected to other equipment.”Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming,” said Michael T. Tolley, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the university. “This is the first untethered robot that can generate jet pulses for rapid locomotion like the squid and can achieve these jet pulses by changing its body shape, which improves swimming efficiency.”The researchers first designed the robot to swim in a tank, before testing it in a larger aquarium. “After we were able to optimize the design of the robot so that it would swim in a tank in the lab, it was especially exciting to see that the robot was able to successfully swim in a large aquarium among coral and fish, demonstrating its feasibility for real-world applications,” said Caleb Christianson, who led the study.

Apple has released its “Health Records” feature in the UK, allowing people to see personal information from their hospital on their iPhone.The feature is intended to allow people to easily pull up their health information, and give them a view of everything from their immunisations to lab results within their iPhone’s Health app.The feature was introduced in the US in 2018, though the work to build the Health features into the iPhone began in 2013, as Apple prepared for the introduction of the Apple Watch. Since it launched, Apple has added a host of US institutions to the service, meaning patients at more than 500 institutions are able to see their health records.Now it is rolling out in the UK, as well as Canada, representing the first time the tool has become available internationally. It is currently only available with two institutions in Britain – Oxford University Hospitals and Milton Keynes University Hospital – but more are expected to follow in the future.The Health Records feature sits alongside the more traditional tracking information that can be found in the Health app. That piece of software integrates information taken from sensors inside the Apple Watch and the phone itself, as well as data from third-party apps, to collate all of the information the iPhone has about its owner.Read moreHealth Records information is added by clicking onto the “Browse” menu and searching for the relevant institution. Choosing from that list should begin the process of pulling in information from the relevant NHS trust in the UK, and more than one institution and its data can be collated into the app.If the feature is enabled, that Health app should then show medical information such as lab results and immunisations alongside the more traditional fitness and activity tracking information like heart rate and step count. Those lab results could include coronavirus tests, for instance.When it is turned on, the feature creates a direct connection between the phone and the medical institution, Apple said. That connection only goes one way, and does not send information back up to the healthcare provider – if a user wants to share their heart rate data with a doctor, for instance, they will still have to do so by showing their phone.Apple stressed in its announcement that the feature had been designed with privacy at the forefront. All information is encrypted both as it is transferred to the phone and when it arrives on it, meaning that it cannot be read by anyone else, including Apple.“We designed Health Records on iPhone to empower people to easily view their health records at any time, and we are thrilled to put this feature in the hands of customers in the UK and Canada,” said Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology, in a statement.“We believe people should have access to their health information in the most private and secure way, and we have worked hand in hand with healthcare institutions and organizations to put privacy at the center of the patient experience.”Those protections only apply to the data after it has been pulled from the institutions’ servers, and is either on its way to the phone or has arrived there. As such, the data as it is stored by the NHS is not changed by the new announcement.Users are also able to share that medical information with other third-party apps, as they have long been able to do with other information stored in the Health app. Users will be asked to agree to that information being shared – and then asked repeatedly after that, to ensure that they are still happy with new data being shared, which represents an extra protection when compared with other health information.Apple’s service is built on a standard integration known as FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is used by a range of the largest companies that provide patient data systems to healthcare institutions. That means that the two systems should be able to work together relatively easily, integrating the necessary technology and then enrolling themselves into the app.Apple said that more medical facilities will be integrated into the app “in the coming months”. It did not say which organisations would be joining, or when they would arrive.But NHSX – the government body tasked with setting policy on the NHS’s use of data and technology – praised the announcement in a statement, suggesting other institutions within the health service could be on their way.“At NHSX, we are committed to giving patients access to their own records so they can take charge of their healthcare,” said Matthew Gould, CEO of NHSX. “The launch of Health Records on iPhone in the UK is a positive step and joins a number of initiatives across the NHS to put patients in the driving seat.”Apple has continuously been moving into the health space, and has added a host of health tracking features to its recent devices, including specialised electrocardiogram and blood oxygen tools with newer versions of the Apple Watch. Last year, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said that he thought that the company’s work on health would be its “greatest contribution to mankind”.

The new Apple Watch’s biggest feature is not, for the most part, visible to anyone who is wearing it. Every so often, in the dark, your wrist might glow red, reflecting a light shining out of the Watch that is measuring your blood.The Watch uses that glow to measure the amount of oxygen in your blood. And, Apple hopes, that measurement could provide entirely new ways of understanding your own wellbeing.That red glow comes from LEDs on the back of the watch, which shine out, through your skin and into the blood. A sensor made up of photodiodes, in the same panel, can measure the amount of light that’s reflected back – the brighter the blood, the more oxygen it is carrying – feeding those measurements into algorithms that provide an estimate of blood oxygen.When you head to Apple’s page for its new Watch, it’s not the speed of the processors or the brightness of the screen that it tries to sell you on. Instead, there’s that same red glow, and the promise that “the future of health is on your wrist”.Apple hasn’t always talked about its Watch this way. When it first arrived, in 2015, it wasn’t necessarily particularly health-focused at all.Read moreEarly marketing focused on three main features: its function as a way of telling the time, its various communication features, and its role as a “comprehensive health and fitness device”. But that was weighted much more towards fitness than it was health, and the heart rate monitor that was included on its back was put there primarily as a way of ensuring that it could get an effective measurement of calories, rather than offering any view of the heart itself.Over time, that changed. With the introduction of the Series 4 in 2018, Apple added the ability to collect an electrocardiogram or ECG, a graph showing the precise workings of a person’s heart. It received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration – the first time a smartwatch had done so – and Apple stressed that while many people might never require the feature, it could be vital for those who do.Over time, Apple highlighted some of those: its keynotes began to feature messages from people who had been alerted by the heart rate monitor to unusual readings, whose Watches had detected a fall and allowed them to call for help, whose ECGs had shown irregularities. Those features – largely living in the background, and focused on people’s wellbeing – became a key part of Apple’s presentations. Measurements of the speed of a processor or battery life being displaced by measurements of heart rate and cardiovascular health.Tim Cook said in 2019 that – when people look back from an imagined future at the work his company did – he believed Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind would be “about health”. It was a bold claim for a company that prides itself on fundamentally having changed the way people communicate with the iPhone, and other advances, but if nothing else it was an indication of where Mr Cook’s priorities are.The new Series 6 is surely the most clear example of that yet. While the Watch does have other advances and new features that are of the kind you would normally expect from a technology company – a faster processor, a brighter screen – it’s the blood oxygen sensor that dominated the introduction, and which is the new feature that Apple has spent the most time talking about.It’s a change that has happened gradually over the now relatively long life of the Apple Watch. But the company is aware of its particularly topical nature at the moment, as the entire world grapples with a health crisis unprecedented in living memory.”We’re living in a time with a constant reminder that there’s nothing more important than your health,” says Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “At Apple, our health journey happened organically. It happened as we pulled on threads at different points.”We have an opportunity and a huge responsibility as a matter of fact to help people and empower them with more information about their health.”Other companies have added blood oxygen sensors before: Garmin, for instance, has incorporated it in many of its high-end watches and uses it to inform indications of whether its wearer has adjusted to changes in altitude and how much that might affect their exercise.But the metric has never enjoyed quite such a mainstream presence, being promoted by the biggest company in the world on the biggest watch in the world.For now, the uses of the blood oxygen sensor are somewhat limited. There’s not all that much a person can do about the amount of oxygen in their blood, and so it is better described as a measure of a person’s wellbeing than a target to improve like some of the other metrics that come out of the watch.”Blood oxygen saturation reflects both the environment you’re in – whether you’re at high altitude for example – and how well your body is able to take oxygen in and deliver it through the blood,” says Williams. “It is a powerful signal about you and your wellbeing.”But pulse oximetry is an investment for the future. As a measure of how well the blood is doing its job, it could be a key metric for predicting, sensing and living with a variety of medical issues.Those people who buy the new Apple Watch are participating in work that is heading towards that. During the reveal of the watch, Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, announced that the company was not only integrating the blood oxygen sensor but launching three new studies to understand how it might be used.”It is meant for fitness and wellness purposes,” says Desai. “We’re doing research to learn more. And backing what we can do with science is really important which is why we take the approach of research and want to go on this journey together with both our users and the medical community.”That research includes an asthma study working with University of California, Irvine, and Anthem and another looking at the relationship between metrics including blood oxygen and heart failure, working with the University Health Network and the University of Toronto. But perhaps most exciting for the future – and certainly most topical – is a study working with the Seattle Flu Study and the University of Washington School of Medicine to see whether heart rate and blood oxygen can be used to spot respiratory conditions including flu and covid-19.There have already been indications that pulse oximetry could be used to spot such diseases, and a range of technology companies are working to understand whether their blood oxygen sensors might have any role in the fight against covid-19. But again Apple’s scope – of its products, the number of its users and its ambitions – could rapidly accelerate that research, meaning that the sensor that is used for wellness today could one day become even more, precisely as a result of you buying and wearing it.Blood oxygen isn’t the only new feature that aims to bring what has historically been a specialised and medicalised measurement onto the watch. With new updates, Apple has added the ability to measure VO2 max in a lower range, which it says will be useful for those people who are using their watch to bring their fitness up from a lower level.VO2 max is a fairly specialised metric: in its strictest sense, it measures the maximum amount of oxygen that a person is able to take in. But it has also been used a test of a person’s cardiovascular fitness, and it’s that more general indication of health that the Apple Watch aims to recreate.Historically, the VO2 max test was a fairly gruelling endeavour: a participant straps on a mask that monitors their breathing while they undertake intense exercise such a running or moving on an exercise bike. The Apple Watch has been able to recreate that by watching its wearer’s heart rate as they exercise, inferring their fitness by measuring how much a given activity requires of their cardiovascular system.”The thing that’s really powerful about VO2 Max is that you traditionally have to go into a clinic,” says Desai. “It’s a really uncomfortable test to do. Now to be able to measure that with watch will be really powerful.”Now the Watch will be able to expand that metric, giving it to even more people. And the utility of the readings is that – perhaps unlike blood oxygen – people can very much do something about this, since improving their fitness will improve the measurement, and what they do will be reflected in that reading over time.”Apple did a huge body of work to measure lower VO2 max range,” says Williams. “Now it’s easily available, I see a future where this is a much more common and meaningful metric of health. And the great news about this one is that you can actually take action and improve it. It’s not just a signal that you’re in a low range, you can change the trajectory of.”