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A quiet revolution has been going on in the medical profession and the field of personal health in the last two years, spearheaded by smartphones and tablets, that will change forever the way we obtain and process medical information. Called mHealth (Mobile Health), this industry phenomenon encompasses a wide range of applications - from self-treatment apps on sub-$100 Android phones in Kenya, through texting reminders for the immunization schedule of newborn babies in India, up to testing yourself for STDs with a smartphone kit, or your doctor panning and zooming radiology scans on the go.

This guide is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Portfolio, which supports bold ideas at the cutting edge of health and health care, in partnership with Institute for the Future. Our goal is to gather and organize the world's collective self-tracking resources in one place, in a way that is useful and encourages collaboration between self-tracking experts and beginners who are just starting out.

During REM sleep, the respiratory pattern is irregular, with differences in the size of breaths and the spacing between them. Breathing during deep sleep follows an ordered pattern, "like a sine wave," says Bianchi. "And the breath-to-breath differences are very small." The lighter stages of non-REM sleep fall somewhere in between. "The motivation behind the shirt is to allow repeated measurements over time in the home," he adds. Users can log their habits, such as coffee or alcohol intake, exercise, or stress, and look for patterns in how those variables affect their quality of sleep.

In what is believed to be the first operation of its kind, a patient voluntarily agrees to amputation of his hand so it could be replaced with a bionic replacement.  "Patrick is already testing a new hand, which its makers say will give him much greater movement. The hand has six sensors fitted over nerves within the lower arm, rather than the two on his current prosthesis."  Embedded video shows him doing daily routines with his new hand.  

Doctors can now make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone/Android app with close to the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation, researchers from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have shown in a new study. The Resolution MD Mobile app lets physicians view and manipulate remote medical images in high-resolution 3-D on the iPhone or Android phone, allowing for a quick diagnosis for the treatment of stroke, cardiac arrest, or other emergencies. 

Engineers have developed a device platform that combines electronic components for sensing, medical diagnostics, communications and human-machine interfaces, all on an ultrathin skin-like patch that mounts directly onto the skin with the ease, flexibility and comfort of a temporary tattoo. Led by researcher John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, the researchers described their novel skin-mounted electronics in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Science.

Aug. 10, 2011 -- Two of three patients dying of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) appear cured and a third is in partial remission after infusions of genetically engineered T cells...."Our results were absolutely dramatic. It is tremendously exciting," Porter tells WebMD. 

Human colon stem cells have been identified and grown in a petri dish in the lab for the first time. This achievement, made by researchers of the Colorectal Cancer Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and published in Nature Medicine, is a crucial advance towards regenerative medicine. Throughout life, stem cells of the colon regenerate the inner layer of our large intestine in a weekly basis. For decades scientists had evidences of the existence of these cells yet their identity remained elusive. Scientists led by the ICREA Professor and researcher at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) Eduard Batlle discovered the precise location of the stem cells in the human colon and worked out a method that allows their isolation and in vitro expansion, that is their propagation in lab-plates (petri dishes).

It's clear that the Fraunhofer researchers didn't set out to hit this milestone in camera technology. What they were really interested in was trying to improve upon endoscope technology. An endoscope involves a camera at the tip of a tube. The tube contains a wire that transmits the image back to a computer. The tube also serves as a way to physically manipulative the camera to snake it through the gastrointestinal tract, for instance. Typical endoscopes cost around $25,000-30,000 so they must be reused many times. Because the endoscope is going in and out of people's bodies, it must be cleaned and sterilized between each use, which just drives up the cost of maintaining the instrument. It's no wonder that hospitals charge more than $2,000 per endoscopy. All of this, however, would change if the camera was cheap enough to throw away.