Picture frames become works of art

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Digital photos have never looked better. (It gets easier with each new multimegapixel camera.)

But digital frames (whether made with black plastic or stained wood) have remained, for the most part, pitifully ugly.

If you are truly proud of your work, you should print it and put it in a proper frame.

A Bluetooth picture frame due out this week stands on its own as a work of art.

The black and white Parrot frame, by Andree Putman (parrotshopping.com), has a checkered base, giving it something of a retro-diner look.

The frame's high-fashion looks come at a price, though: $450.

Learning

Making peace with battery-operated toys

I am starting to think that my biggest problem with battery-operated toys is me. (See my July 14 rant about toys.)

I still think they are loud as heck. And, even more annoyingly, many of them now need mom or dad to program them - if you want them to really work as teaching tools. But the toys also seem to work.

One afternoon, my daughter Maeve and her pal Caleb tucked into LeapFrog's Didj and Leapster2 hand-held games, and played for a half-hour straight, learning to recognize numbers with Wall-E and other familiar characters.

Both Maeve and Caleb are headed for kindergarten next year. I should add that my 2-year-old, Oona, is suddenly saying the alphabet quite clearly, thanks to an old LeapFrog Alphabet Pal Caterpillar that Maeve hardly took to.

Neither of the girls has warmed to LeapFrog's Tag optical pen system, which picks up on characters and drawings in special books to help your preschooler or elementary school student along in his reading.

You must use the software that accompanies the LeapFrog games if you want to tailor your kid's learning and track his progress.

prototypes

Harvard professor's vital signs monitor could be a lifesaver

Most of what I know about lifesaving is based on what I've seen of the paramedics of Squad 51. As I recall, they radio in a patient's vitals to the doctors to Rampart Hospital, stick a needle in him, and put him in the bus.

There is more to the job than that, surely. But one thing I've observed in TV medical dramas is apparently true: Not much data is gathered between the moment a patient is stabilized in the field and when he comes crashing through those swinging hospital doors.

Harvard professor Matt Welsh has developed a wearable radio relay, or mote, which can collect and transmit an unbroken stream of vital signs to help doctors make better decisions in the emergency room.

Typically, motes connect to environmental and other sensors and form flexible, ad-hoc networks with other motes.

Some vineyard operators in the western United States and Canada are using the devices to monitor the conditions around their vines, for example.

Engineers program the motes using operating systems like TinyOS, which Welsh helped develop while doing research at the University of California at Berkeley.

Vineyard motes might be fitted with temperature and humidity sensors. A triage mote could connect to a pulse oximeter on a patient's finger, an EKG, a blood pressure cuff, and an LED display.

The wearable mote Welsh developed as part of a research project at Harvard, called CodeBlue, can help emergency workers triage large numbers of casualties in very little time.

Welsh and a medical team tested sensor motes in Baltimore two years ago, in a simulated bus accident involving 20 passengers.

And doctors at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston are using motes fitted with accelerometers to continually monitor the status of some stroke and Parkinson's disease patients, Welsh said.

The motes at Spaulding, attached to different parts of a patient's body, detect tremors and sluggishness. Doctors can then use that data to tweak the patient's drugs and deep-brain stimulation treatments, Welsh said.

Intel has also developed an advanced healthcare sensor mote, called Shimmer (shimmer-research.com), which is being sold by the Irish company Realtime Technologies.