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The Power of Visuals: Capturing the Candidates Attention

We love talking to you via our social media. It is the best place to share about…most things! However, we believe in the power of visuals. A compelling visual speaks a thousand word. Infographics, GIF, or short videos can simplify complex information and help the reader (especially on social media to quickly digest the message.

Seems straightforward? Maybe not entirely. However, there are many reasons that some of us might be hesitant to use visuals when sharing information related to the organisation across social media.

We at Medical Engineers believe that you should be able to maximise your presences on the internet; therefore it would help the candidates learn about your organisation.

Let’s kick start with some easy and free tools that you can use today.

Canva

Ever imagine that you can be a graphic designer? Canva is the tool that can quickly enhance your presences on social media. How? You can browse some inspiration and customise the design for your social media posts. With thousands of fonts, icons, and frames options (more if you subscribe to the premium plan), you can easily create a mesmerising post. The most striking feature of Canva is that every action is ‘drag and drop’ therefore you can edit and add as many elements of your social media posts.

Flaticon

Never underestimate the power of an icon. It may be small, but if you know how to assemble these images together, then you might surprise yourself with a compelling result on your social media post. An engaging and attractive post will have a higher chance to steal the attention of your audiences. You can search for icons that you need then download the file format based on your requirement (e.g. PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD).

GIPHY

Who doesn’t want to Retweet #TGIF gif on Twitter? Or not to press the ‘love’ button on the #mondaymotivation on Instagram. A repeated moving images or montage from a movie/TV show can help you to engage with your users on social media. Whether it is a job vacancy announcement or event, you can always express your creativity with a gif.

For more related news on the latest trend in recruitment and jobs in medical devices and diagnostics industry from Medical Engineers, you can follow our Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Also, follow us on Instagram to find inspiration on related engineering news.

The Must Have Medical Devices Apps for iPhone and iPad

Apple released the iPhone X to celebrate the ten years anniversary birth of the first iPhone. The device has been part of our daily lives, and we cannot live without it.

Until now, you might realise that the phone can track our heart rates and walk rates throughout the day. However, you might not be familiar with the capabilities of utilising iPhone to be medical devices. In this blog, we are going to share with you the five medical devices application that you can integrate with your iOS devices.

iBGStar Glucose Meter

People with diabetes can easily record and track their glucose meter easily. This device will connect with iPhone to view and share blood and glucose readings while it can also be programmed to remind you to check the glucose levels.

iPhoneECG Electrocardiogram

You can incorporate electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes in the back of the phone or an iPhone case. The objective of this device is to monitor patients with symptoms of arrhythmia. The AlliveECG app enables you to receive an expert analysis with a minimal fee. The device will record the ECG by placing your fingertips on the electrodes attached to your iPhone.

Withings Blood Pressure Monitor
The device will help you to monitor hypertension by measuring the systolic and diastolic blood pressure and pulse rate with an inflatable cuff. The inflatable cuff is wireless enabled and compatible with iOS devices and costs $99.95.

ECEM Pulse Oximeter
The ECEM Pulse Oximeter will help you to monitors the oxygenation of haemoglobin in the blood stream. A small light will beam through the tissue of the patients to a receiver by attaching the finger to a small clip of the device. The light received by the sensor will translate into a percentage of oxygen saturation of the blood.

Holli’s Apps of Google Glass

Holli is a Google Glass’ application helps children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to learn about social skills.

Children with AHD will benefit from this technology since ‘it is a motivating learning medium’ (Williams et al., 2002) and ‘the technology provides a highly motivating medium for a rehearsal of skills in a safe, controlled, self-paced manner’ (Parson et al., 2000).

‘The interesting thing about our new technology is that we are not trying to replace human to human interaction; instead we use this app to coach children to communicate with people in real-world situation,’ as said to Azadah Kushki, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedicals and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto and Scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute Toronto, Canada (DeLaOsa, 2017).

Holli will capture the conversation between the users and the partner via embedded Google Glass’s microphone. The Google Speech recognition engine will translate the spoken word into text and displayed through the head mounted display.

When Google Speech Recognition processes the spoken words before offering recommendation to users

The sample of conversation after Holli processed the spoken words using the Google Speech recognition engine

Children with AHD will benefit from this technology since ‘it is a motivating learning medium’ (Williams et al., 2002) also ‘the technology provides a highly motivating medium for a rehearsal of skills in a safe, controlled, self-paced manner’ (Parson et al., 2000).

The team would hope that the more children with ASD can enjoy the benefits from Holli to improve their social skills.

Adapted from: ECN Magazine with additional resources from Frontiersin.org

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The Viability of Drones as the Future of Medical Devices

Drone technology might be the solution to transport blood supplies to uncharted location during an emergency situation.

Based on the study conducted by John Hopkins, ‘transport drones can safely deliver large bags of red blood cells, blood plasma, or platelets’ (Tantibanchachai, 2017). In addition, the study might help us to unravel the safety of drone transport.

The researchers compared the three packages of blood samples (6 approximately 250 mL leukoreduced apheresis DLT units ACD-A with the temperature of 20-24 degrees Celcius, 6 approximately 350 mL leukoreduced RBC units with Asdol at the temperature of 1-10 degrees Celcius, and 6 approximately 225 mL FP24 with CPD 2. A type K thermocouple attached to a digital temperature logger. These packages flew above the ground level of 100 meters for 22 minutes.

The experiment indicated two siginificant results. Firstly. there is a decline in the temperature of 1.5 – 4 degrees Celcius in three blood packages. Also, there is ‘no significant changes in PLT count, PH, or MPV and changes in the FP24 bubbles’ (Amukele et al., 2016).

The drone that carried the blood supplies during the experiment

‘For rural areas that lack access to nearby clinics, or that may lack the infrastructure for collecting blood products or transporting them on their own, drones can provide that access,’ says Timothy Amukele, an assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Tantibanchachai, 2017).

The use of a drone to transport delicate logistics such as blood supplies is viable. Despite ‘no precedent for packaging blood products for drone transport,’ the method could provide a rapid response during an emergency situation in remote areas.

Adapted from: HUB of John Hopkins University

Virtual Reality: The Future of Medical Diagnosis

Researchers at Stanford Concussion and Brain Performance Center can diagnose concussions using virtual reality (VR) device. Sounds futuristic? Not quite.

For Jamshid Gahjar, MD, PhD, Director of the Center said that ‘brain injuries are still poorly understood’. By using Eye-Sync technology – a VR headset platforms that track eye movements and reports signs of impairment in eye-trackers and records eye movement. The software produces a report indicating any eye movement impairment.

The study will test the balance of the participant by observing their standing posture with their eyes closed and ‘…one process powers the eyes to follow the world around you as you move your head. The other tracks moving objects as your head stays still. Simply moving one’s head around while looking at a stationary object can induce nausea and other symptoms of a concussion, and it is an easy test to perform to assess the first process powering attention. It’s more difficult to assess the second attention process and to notice how accurately the eyes are following a rapidly moving object’ (MedGadget.com, 2016).

A healthy person can tracks the dot accurately predicting how it will move. However, those who suffered from concussions will not be able to predict the moving dot leading to erratic eye movements as you can see from the illustration below:

Eye movement of a participant without concussion

The erratic eye movement of a participant with concussion

Lastly, the medical practitioner can utilise the technology to improve the diagnosis of a concussion. As there is not exactly a cure for a concussion, the study concluded that sleep and exercise are the best remedies to recover from a concussion (MedGadget.com, 2016).

Adapted from: Staford Health Care and MedGadget.com

Nintendo’s Wii is the Answer to Improve the Health of Patients with Parkinson

The new research is currently underway to utilise Nintendo’s Wii game console as the solution to help people with Parkinson disease to improve their movements and speech.

Researchers will ask the participants to stand on a balance board and move a cursor to a specific target, therefore they can monitor the relationship between body movement and brain activity.

‘We’re looking at being able to do things in their house that may be challenging, like put away groceries when you have to stand on your toes and reach for cabinets or to cook and communicate at the same time’ said Jeff Haddad, an associate professor in the Department of Health and Kinesiology (Doty, 2017). For Haddad, ‘when utilized for a prescribed period of time, tended to show more positive outcomes’ (Doty, 2017).

Jessica Huber as a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences said that gameplay can help the patients to improve their speech patterns.

Adapted from: MDT Magazine

3 Tough Interview Questions to Ask your Candidate Today

Interview time is the vital time between you and the potential candidate.in the previous post, we wrote a post about identifying the key questions that you should expect from the candidates in order to know find the ‘one’. However, an interview should be a mutual process where it is the opportunity for both of you to get to know each other. On this blog, we focus on you as an organisation to get the right insights from your candidates, therefore we have several suggestions on the crucial questions that you should ask during the interview.

Do you play a board game?

It may not be a normal question to ask the candidates during an interview. However, it is important for you as an employer to understand how a potential candidate can fit with the social environment of the organisation. Why you have to know the life outside of the office? Asking this question does not indicate that you are being intrusive, instead, you want to gain a better understanding of your candidate regarding their social life. This is an opportunity for you to gain an understanding about how they can fit into the social culture. If your organisation like to organise many internal social events (e.g. monthly thematic employees appreciation gathering), then the candidate might be a good additional team member.

However, if you think they are not then you might want to think about other activities that can enrich their experiences in the workplace.

Tell me what do you want to know about me?

Yes, ask that question. Why? They need to know your personality to ensure that you can work well together. You might expect some questions such as: what are the traits that you are looking for from your team? what is the best way for me to raise a concern about my work? Answer these questions with an open mind. Try to elaborate your responses to ensure that they understand you as a potential team member. You can ask them for follow up questions to ensure that you can give them the best responses. Remember that open communication is a great start to begin a long-lasting relationship.

Why should I not give you the job?

So, why should I not give you the job? Do you think that I should find another candidate with better skills and knowledge? Or, this could be the day where I will accept you as part of the team if you can convince me with outstanding reasons not to reject you. Let the candidate do the job to convince you with their answers. Listen to their responses and find the key ideas that convince you to give you the job.

Virtual Reality is Disrupting the Manufacturing Industry

A virtual reality system can change the future of manufacturing jobs. A team of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is currently developing a VR system for Oculus Rift headset that allows manufacturing workers to teleoperate using a Baxter humanoid model robot.

The system will mimic the “homunculus of the mind” which allows users to feel like they are “inside the robots head.” When the user wears the VR headset, they will be able to match their movement with the robot in other location to complete a various task through a virtual space to open and close the hand grippers to pick up, move, and retrieve items. This can be done by ” mapped the human’s space into the virtual space, and the virtual space is then mapped into the robot space to provide a sense of co-location” (MIT, 2017).

“By teleoperating robots from home, blue-collar workers would be able to telecommute and enjoy the benefit of IT revolution just as white-collar workers do now,” said Jeffrey Lipton from CSAIL Postdoctoral Associate.

Lipton said that the experiment enables the users to complete various tasks such as picking up screws or stapling wires “at a much higher rate” (MIT, 2017) and “the system could pilot the robot from hundreds of miles away, testing it on a hotel’s wireless network in Washington DC to control Baxter at MIT” (MIT, 2017).

Ousamma Khatib, a computer science professor at Stanford University said that “This contribution represents a major milestone in the effort to connect the user with the robot’s space in an intuitive, natural, and effective manner.”

Lastly, the researchers would like to further develop the system more “scalable” for more users and other types of robots.

Adapted from: Eurekaalert.org