Afraid of needles? Soon you may have one less thing to fear. Two companies, Intermountain Healthcare and Velano Vascular, are exploring new tech that could keep people from feeling like pin-cushions at the hospital.
According to Utah news outlet KSL, Velano Vascular has developed a way to use IV catheters for drawing blood — without sticking another hole in the patient. The device is single-use and disposable, and designed to take advantage of the catheter already in use for infusion.
Previously, catheters were only good for putting liquids into the body, not pulling them out. Velano’s new tech uses the already applied IV port to pull quality samples from the bloodstream without stabbing the patient with yet another needle. Velano co-founder Eric Stone said, “It’s simply a tube-in-tube approach.” And it’s already FDA approved.
Patients in the hospital may have their blood taken multiple times in one day. Recurring needle pricks cause bruising, which makes it harder to find a vein and thereby creates the possibility of even more poking and prodding. It can become hellish for the person trying to recuperate.
Considering how much time, energy, and money go into hospital blood collection on a daily basis, improving the process only makes sense. Velano and Intermountain’s plan is to find ways for not only making drawing blood less painful for patients, but also safer for staff.
Velano and Intermountain will look at blood draw operations to figure out if and where to use the new blood draw method. The companies will compare the tube-in-tube IV approach with current care regarding different settings and patient types. The study will include provider safety and patient experience as comparative factors as well.
Stone said, “We are honored to be working with Intermountain, an innovative and visionary organization that is widely recognized for the delivery of the highest quality patient care.” Utah’s Intermountain Healthcare runs a non-profit health care system of 22 hospitals and 185 clinics.
Todd Dun, director of innovation at Intermountain said, “By systematically assessing a very common medical procedure and then identifying innovative yet practical ways to improve it for patients and healthcare providers, our collaboration with Velano represents the forward-thinking approach to enhancing quality of care that defines Intermountain.”
This is just the latest partnership exploring the new blood draw technology. Since Velano got its CE Mark in June, the company has partnered with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Planeetree, and is backed by Griffin Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia among many significant others.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.