Imitation is the best form of flattery

Recently Jeremy and I attended RightsCon 2014.  Among a variety of good things we were able to do and good people to meet with, we caught up with Miles, who has replicated our Mesh Extenders using the open documentation we have created.  While we know the documentation can always be better, it was pleasing that there was enough information for Miles to be able to replicate our work.  You can see our yellow mesh extender next to the one that Miles built himself.  Hopefully this is the first of many replications of our work.  Thanks again Miles for all your work on this and other things!

Low-cost mobile medical devices might just happen

People who know me well know that I have been talking about my desire to commoditise many medical devices by making a mobile-phone based platform that can accept a variety of medical sensors.

The general idea is that the expensive certification can be done once for all on a common hardware platform and core libraries for acquiring, visualising, and storing signals from medical sensors.

This would reduce the cost of developing new medical devices, and allow the same hardware to support many medical devices, driving the cost per function even lower.

I have been thinking for a while about how to get the necessary hardware made, which would have entailed making a custom mobile phone and other complex and expensive things.

However, this all looks much more possible now, thanks to a project that Google have been working on: their Project Ara:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/177708-googles-modular-smartphone-project-ara-could-go-on-sale-next-year-for-50

Ara is a modular mobile phone design, where the various parts can be easily replaced.

This would seem to make this concept much easier to make, at least from the hardware side.