AI Patient App Launched at Alder Hey Hospital

Alder Hey in Partnership with Watson for AI App

The staffs at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool has teamed up with IBM Watson in order to create an app which would be helpful for patients and doctors to work better together. The app would be answering any queries that parents as well as children tend to have regarding their hospital stay. Moreover it will also enable children to create a profile so that clinician will be aware of things like their favourite colour. Later on it could be utilised to provide insights into treatments.

Watson is said to be an AI platform which has been advising doctors on treatment in a dozen cancer hospitals in the US, searching through data and it can read 40 million documents in a matter of 15 seconds and would be offering insights into probable treatment.

It could ultimately do similar things at Alder Hey though has started with more simple patient/doctor app, which has been designed to make the hospital visits function more smoothly. The hospital has been working with the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Councils’- STFCHartree Centre to develop the app.

Helping Patients/Families before Coming to Hospital

Hundreds of Alder Hey patients together with their parents will be asked a range of questions on everything from parking, to what they would like to eat, to their favourite games and films and what they want their bedroom to look like, for the next few months.

Besides this, they would also be asked what questions they have regarding clinical procedures, general anaesthetic as well as surgery. A team of experts from IBM and the Hartree Centre will be utilising this information to train `Watson’ in anticipating and responding to questions from patients and families before they tend to come in the hospital.

A paediatric surgeon and director of innovation at Alder Hey, Mr Iain Hennessey, informed BBC that `helping the patients and their families prepare properly to come into the hospital could reduce their anxiety and would mean that they can get them better and return home faster.

He adds that `so much of medicine is about looking after people and is roughly a third of what is done and it is a neglected part. How we communicate with patients has not changed much over the last 100 years. A leaflet is seen as cutting edge and website of patient information is award-winning’.

AI App – First Project of IBM/STFC Hartree

He stated that later on, the platform may offer `more hard-core diagnostic but informed that governance around using patient data was a nightmare. He wanted to get this off the ground faster and utilising patient records in time consuming, is costly and could cause debate.

Alder Hey is well-known for caring and that is what he wants to build on. The future application would comprise of summaries of patient notes, spotting trends all over the hospital and the AI could also be utilised in providing treatment as well as care options. Paul Chong, IBM’s European director for Watson had stated that he was thrilled to see IBM Watson technology applied to help doctors and the patients in an attempt to enhance the lives of children together with their families.

The AI app is said to be one of the first project that has come out of a wide-ranging £315 million partnership between IBM and STFC Hartree. Contributions from the US tech giant are £200 million while the government has pledged £115 million for research in big data applications. IBM has stated that patients can provide feedback through the app on a voluntary basis.

Turn Your Living Room into a High Tech Paradise

Designers: Homify

Home Tech/Latest Devices/Apps

Living room is agreat place to relax in the midst of family and friends with great number of gadgets that tend to make it much more convenient, enhancing our life and home. Home tech is getting better than ever and the latest devices and apps tend to simplify tasks, making the use of these resources better and alter our way of living. So much so we now find it difficult to do without them. From health and well-being, to home automation, together with personal computing and smart wearable we tend to live in the days of technological revolution. The television is the centre piece of most of the living room and hence tends to be of a high quality placed in the room. Various models have been competing in the market and one can make an appropriate choice based on the budget and models.

Amazon Echo

With achievements done in the technology world, the Amazon Echo is another choice for the living room, which is like Siri. It is just a Bluetooth speaker but then tends to start talking to `Alexa, which is the AI assistant at the core of the device. Besides that, it can do much more. Like Siri or Google Now, or Cortana, it can take down dictated notes, give information regarding the weather, set up alarms, can schedule appointments, read out audio books, add items to a to-do-list or just give random bits of information besides many more tasks. The Echo is said to be better at understanding requests and can get connected to different other smart devices in the home such as Sonos speaker or Philips Hue light. If one intends working on building a smart home, it could be the centre of it all.

TP-Link Archer C9 

Having a reliable Internet connection would enable you to have your connected devices functioning well where the TP-Link Archer C9 has the capability of offering it. It provides fast Wi-Fi speed of over 802.1lac which can manage various devices simultaneously, has good range via its trio of antennas and has various ports for supporting wired as well as wireless connections at the same time. It is also a great mid-tier router available at a good price.

Nest Protect 

This is a smart smoke alarm and carbon dioxide detector that is connected to your home Internet of Things network. It tends to alert you to dangers in any of the rooms it may take place. Smartphone notification makes sure that one is not caught unaware.

Muji Air Purifier 

Muji Air Purifier sucks up dust, pollen etc., filters out the bad air through the three layers of activated charcoal giving out the pure air through the top. The coolest feature is the jet air setting which tends to identify when you are vacuuming around the house and knocks the speed of the fan to a maximum of 30 minutes giving out clean air.

Devices to give us Control of our World

Besides these, there are various other gadgets which have made a great impact in the lifestyle of individuals and the overall way of living. Whether it is a new device which can bring us close together or tend to give us control of our world, we can find a gadget for any purpose one would prefer. The choice is available if the user intends to be in possession of any of them made available in the market.

The German Traffic Light for Smartphone Zombies

Credit: Thomas Hosemann/City of Augsburg

Smartphone Zombie – Substantial Safety Risk

The word `smombie’ is said to be one of the latest addition to the German language. Last November, the term mashup of smartphone and zombie denoting to unaware smartphone users staggering around the cities like the undead had been voted Youth Word of the Year in Germany. Smartphone zombie is a pedestrian who tends to walk slowly and without much attention to their surroundings since they have their focus on their smartphone. It has now become a substantial safety risk since the preoccupied user could result in an accident.

Cities like Chongqing and Antwerp have now introduced special lanes for smartphone users in order to help direct and handle them. China had over 5 hundred million smartphone users, in 2014 and more than half of them had phone addiction. In Chongqing, the government had built a cell phone pavement which separated the phone users and the non-phone users and in Hong Kong, they are known as dai tau juk – the head-down tribe. The disease is said to be infectious. Latest study of 14,000 pedestrians in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Stockholm showed that 17% of the people utilised their smartphone while walking and the substantial users were 25 to 35 years old and nearly a quarter of them showed smombie-esque behaviour.

Install New Traffic Light at Ground Levels

Augsburg, a municipality outside Munich has now braced itself for this new public peril and after many smombies had caused accidents by carelessly crossing tram tracks, the city officials had decided to install new traffic light at ground levels. At HaunstetterstraBe station, one of the two location intended for experiment, 16 red LEDs, each of which were the size of a beer mat had been embedded in the pavement next to a tram crossing. Passengers had been divided according to their merits.

Katja Lechner shuttles here daily to university and states that you really do see the lights blinking when the tram tends to approach but that does not stop anybody from crossing since people seem to rush to catch their trains. She is of the opinion that the €10,000 could have been invested in education. Arzu Araz, a hairdresser living nearby with her seven year old daughter seems to disagree and states that `the lights are ideal for kids who seem to notice them instantly’.

Smartphone Enabled with Corresponding App – Watch Out

Augsburg does not seem to be the first city to react. Cologne has prepared three trams crossing with same lights, prompting the creation of another portmanteau - `Bompeln’ which is an abbreviation of `Boden-Ampeln’ – ground traffic lights. In Munich, where a 15 year old girl with her headphones on, was killed by the tram recently, definite dangerous crossings had been fitted with special beacons which send warnings to smartphone enabled with a corresponding app known as `Watch Out’.

Meanwhile in the US, cities like Portland, Seattle and Cleveland have tested with talking buses which alert pedestrians during turns while Rexburg, Idaho have even imposed fines of $50 for walking and texting. A theme park in the Chinese city of Chongqing had experimented that tested with a special `phone lane’ for pedestrians based on an earlier investigation in Washington, DC. Augsburg official, after an experimental period, will be interviewing tram drivers as well as passengers before determining whether to roll the lights out to other stations.

Google Keyboard for Android now has a one handed mode

Updated Google Keyboard for Android

Google Keyboard for Android has received substantial update inclusive of a one handed mode, some designs have tweaked and the capability of resizing the keyboard’s height to one’s own inclination. There is now an option to display borders around the keys so one can be certain of which one they would be tapping. The one-handed feature enables the user to choose if they prefer the keyboard tailored for the right or left hand while at the same time also tends to offer a quick way to toggle back to the full-sized version.

New number icon near the spacebar tends to open up traditional phone-style number pad which is quite easier to thumb at, rapidly. Users have the option of sharing `small snippets’ of input with Google for improving Google Keyboard for all. Apparently that ties into the keyboard suggestions as well as making word prediction smarter. The height of the keyboard can now be accustomed between five various options which ranges from short to tall, with `normal’ as the middle point between them.

3D Touch Cursor Control of Apple

Besides this, there are also more additions like some neat gesture. For instance of just tapping and holding on the spacebar and moving left or right to move the cursor around quickly which sounds like Google’s answer to the handy 3D Touch cursor control of Apple. It is also a trick that is seen earlier in third-party keyboards. Users can now delete complete words rather than single characters. This can be done by sliding left from the delete key which is a strange update if one is a fan of Google’s keyboard over other choices on Android.

The new feature came up after the report Google has been working to bring its keyboard to iPhone. Google Keyboard 5.0 is rolling out now and with patience one can download it directly from Android Police. One Handed Mode essentially makes the normal keyboard to shrink down, forcing it over to one side or the other, making it easier to type with one hand. To check out One-Handed Mode in the latest version of Google Keyboard, version 5.0 of the keyboard need to be installed.

Chrome’s Omnibar Symbol – Backslash instead of Comma

Being new, Play Store update tend to roll out in stages to users and some may already have it, if not one could wait for a few days or get it from APK Mirror, directly, which is a trusted and reliable site for downloading free Play Store apps. While doing this, ensure to grab the right version since there are 32-bit as well as 64-bit versions.

Once the keyboard is installed, one needs to long press on the comma key, sliding the thumb over to the left icon, the one which tends to look like a little hand over a square which in GoogleLand means `make the keyboard smaller’. Another thing worth mentioning is that if one is attempting to do this by utilising Chrome’s Omnibar as the text input field, then this particular symbol will be a backslash and not a comma. The keyboard will be made small and forced to one side. In order to switch side, one could hit the arrow. To make the same bigger again, you could hit the maximize icon.

Facebook Pays $10,000 to 10-year-old Instagram Hacker

Youngest Recipient of Facebook’s `Bug Bounty’

A 10-year old Finnish boy has been rewarded a sum of $10,000 by social media giant Facebook for locating a malfunction in its picture sharing app Instagram. The last name of Jani has not been revealed for privacy reason who is the youngest ever recipient of Facebook’s `bug bounty’ paid to users who tend to find bugs or flaws in its platforms. Jani had informed Finland’s Iltalehti newspaper that he wanted to see if Instagram’s comment field could stand malicious code and it turned out that it could not.

Facebook stated that the malfunction had been fixed in February and the reward had been paid in March. Jani who is yet too young to have a Facebook or Instagram account of his own, informed that he learned coding from Youtube videos and identified a way to delete user comments from Instagram accounts. He informed Iltalehti that he could have deleted anybody’s comment from there. He stated that he was thinking about a career in data security though for the moment his plans comprise of buying a new bike and a football with the reward money.

Not Unusual for Teenagers to Submit Reports to Program

Since 2011, Facebook has been running its `bug bounty program, which had been rewarding hackers when they report problems of tech and security. Since its launch, Facebook’s bug bounty had awarded over $4.3 million to more than 800 researchers across the world where the program tends to determine the pay-out based on the risk of the bug instead of how complex it could be. In 2015 alone, 210 researchers had received $936,000 with an average pay-out of $1,780.

A Facebook spokesperson informed CNNMoney that it is not unusual for teenagers to submit reports to the program. Several tech companies tend to offer similar programs to hackers who seem to report cyber-security susceptibilities. Uber had recently started offering $10,000 rewards for every critical problem which were identified by the hackers. AT&T payments range from $100 to $5,000, while Google tends to pay between $100 to $20,000.The Finnish boy has become the youngest recipient of cash from Facebook for hacking its products.

Created Test Instagram Account

The earlier record had been set by a 13 year old way back in 2013 which means that his latest young hacker is the first person to crash a Facebook product which are not technically even able to utilise considering that it is supposed to be limited to below 13s. The company had informed Forbes that while poking around where he should not have been, Jani found that he could change code on Instagram’s server and force deletes the posts of users.

This had been confirmed by Facebook utilising a test account and had patched it in February. It is not clear how Jani had identified the vulnerability. Iltalehti had reported that Jani together with his brother had a habit of watching videos regarding computer security on YouTube. The bug was a problem with Instagram’s application program interface of API, on how the app tends to communicate with the server.


If one has to erase a remark from Instagram, the API seems to check that you have the authority to delete the comment. After Jani had informed Facebook regarding the problem, the company had created a test Instagram account and had posted a comment. Facebook had then asked him to go ahead and delete the comment.