Smartphone Audio Guide for Visual Impaired

Tactile paving for people with visual impairments in Japan has recently been enhanced with audio guidance, as the developers of the technology aim to improve the lives of people with partial sight and assist sighted tourists. The new braille blocks are marked with black stickers in special patterns. By scanning the coded blocks with a smartphone camera and app, users can listen to audio information about the location and its surroundings. The system was jointly developed by the laboratory of Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Tokyo-based W&M systems LLC.

Those behind the technology hope it can also be made available to tourists and foreigners as they walk the streets of Japan, whether they are sighted or not. The special braille blocks were first introduced in Kanazawa, central Japan, in 2019 and have since been installed in other areas, appearing at train stations, pedestrian streets and public offices in 10 prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, as of April. The developers plan to make the system available in multiple languages and are considering enabling it to answer questions by incorporating generative artificial intelligence capabilities.

More information:

https://japantoday.com/category/national/speaking-tactile-sidewalks-enrich-lives-of-visually-impaired

Robot Removes Pig Gallbladders

Automated surgery could be trialled on humans within a decade, after an AI-trained robot armed with tools to cut, clip and grab soft tissue successfully removed pig gall bladders without human help. The robot surgeons were schooled on video footage of human medics conducting operations using organs taken from dead pigs. Eight operations were conducted on pig organs with a 100% success rate by a team led by experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the US. The technology allowing robots to handle complex soft tissues such as gallbladders, which release bile to aid digestion, is rooted in the same type of computerised neural networks that underpin widely used AI tools such as Chat GPT or Google Gemini.

The surgical robots were slightly slower than human doctors, but they were less jerky and plotted shorter trajectories between tasks. The robots were also able to repeatedly correct mistakes as they went along, asked for different tools and adapted to anatomical variation, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Science Robotics. In the Johns Hopkins trial, the robots took just over five minutes to carry out the operation, which required 17 steps including cutting the gallbladder away from its connection to the liver, applying six clips in a specific order and removing the organ. The robots on average corrected course without any human help six times in each operation.

More information:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/09/robot-surgery-on-humans-could-be-trialled-within-decade-after-success-on-pig-organs

Fitbits Predict Child’s Risk of Postoperative Complications

A Fitbit a day just might help keep your post-surgery woes at bay. Research today finds that wearable data can predict children’s risk of health problems following a removed appendix. Scientists in Chicago conducted the study, which equipped over a hundred children with Fitbits after their appendectomy.

Using a specially designed algorithm, the Fitbits accurately detected whether children would develop postoperative complications, often days before they were formally diagnosed. The findings suggest that wearables can be turned into a reliable early warning system for people leaving medical care, particularly children.

More information:

https://gizmodo.com/your-fitbit-could-become-your-post-surgery-best-friend-2000626818