Biogen Idec, the biotechnology company specializing in treatments of of neurodegenerative, hematologic and autoimmune diseases has formed an alliance with Google’s stealthy advanced research arm Google X in order to study the ‘environmental and biological contributors’ to the spread of multiple sclerosis.

The collaboration intends to tap latest tech utilizing sensors, software and data analysis tools, to glean data from affected people essentially to explain the variable nature of multiple sclerosis progression in different patients, explained Rick Rudick, Biogen’s VP of development sciences, reports Bloomberg.

“We used to see patients at the beginning stages of MS — two women would come in with optic neuritis, they couldn’t see out of one eye, they’d have some spots on the MRI scan, and they looked very similar,” recounts Rudick, once a director of the Cleveland Clinic’s MS program. “But as we followed them along, 10 years later, one would be a championship tennis player still and one would be in a nursing home. I never understood that.”

This isn’t the first such instance where the Massachusetts, US based company has been experimenting with latest devices in this field. It gave out 250 Fitbit bands to MS patients in the U.S. last year to track their level of activity and sleep patterns. Data on movement of patients, their speeds and other such nuances could help understand the progression of the disease.

“Our central thesis is to change health care from being reactive to proactive,” Andrew Conrad, the head of the Life Sciences division at Google X told Bloomberg in a telephone interview. “We’re trying to understand disease at its onset and see if we can intervene early.”

The life science division of Google X labs has been upto a lot lately, with Google Glass and self-driving cars on its resume.

Read more here.

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The world’s most profound event for wearables will once again gather all important players of the wearable tech ecosystem at the 14th WT | Wearable Technologies Conference in Munich on February 2 and 3.

Check out our video from last year’s conference.

With more than 80,000 visitors, about 100 exhibitors, huge media interest the WT I Wearable Week is certainly next year’s most important event around wearables featuring world-class speakers, an extensive conference exhibition a special fashion event, and our WT design booth at the leading sporting goods tradeshow ISPO.

Register today and be part of the WT I Wearable Week 2015!

Researchers at Dartmouth College have been working on a solution to work around the shortcomings of inactivity timeouts and other security risks that arise when a user does not log out.

Conventional authentication methods based on passwords, tokens or fingerprints perform one-time authentication and rely on users logging out once they are done. However risks arise when the user fails to log out, and inactivity timeouts prove ineffective if the timeout is too long or too short.

That’s where ZEBRA – or Zero-Effort Bilateral Recurring Authentication- comes in. The user wears the ZEBRA bracelet, loaded with a built-in accelerometer, gyroscope, and radio on his/her dominant wrist. The bracelet records the wrist movement, processes it, and sends it to the terminal which then compares the wrist movement with the inputs it receives from the user (via keyboard and mouse), and confirms the proximity of the user only if they correlate, enunciates a paper explaining the research.

In an email to Motherboard, Professor David Kotz explains, “ZEBRA bracelet could act as a second factor for initial authentication.” He believes that the device could be customised, in principle, to be integrated into a variety of devices.

Dartmouth PhD student Shrirang Mare added that next on the agenda is to project the authentication technique to tablets and smartphones. If the recent spate of celebrity hacking has taught us anything, it’s that current data security procedures are not robust enough. Perhaps ZEBRA could be the personal online security breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.

Source: Motherboard

(Image credits: Flickr, Shimmer)