Medical mood ring will keep doctors in their patient’s loop

Misty Harris
Sun

Wireless technology has produced a “medical mood ring” that heralds a revolution in emergency health care.

Phillip Shaltis, one of three mechanical engineers behind the invention, says the battery-powered ring transmits a patient’s vital signs to a cellphone or computer, allowing caregivers to determine remotely if medical assistance is needed.

“The idea, ultimately, is to try to shrink an entire intensive-care unit down into a single ring,” says Shaltis, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “We want to provide a new kind of direction to medicine in general, taking a lot of the health care out of the hospital by providing a new modality to patients.”

Although MIT has baptized the device as a mood ring for the medical set, it’s actually aimed at measuring people’s physiological responses. Equipped with two diodes that send pulses of red and infrared light through the wearer’s finger, the ring tracks temperature, heart rate and blood-oxygen levels.

Shaltis, along with fellow MIT engineers Harry Asada and Sokwoo Rhee, designed it to be used in hospital waiting rooms, to monitor at-home recovery after surgery, to track patient reactions to medication, and for general fitness monitoring.

“The biggest difficulty with any of these wearable devices is providing a signal that’s reliable outside a hospital,” Shaltis says. “When a patient is outside running around, it’s much, much harder to transmit data because of all the motions being made and the conditions the body is going through.”

A new report issued by the Cambridge consultancy, Wireless Healthcare, suggests mobile carriers will play a key role in health monitoring in the future, and recent developments in the field support that view.

“Canada is going head to head with a number of key research groups and everybody is focusing on wireless,” says Masako Miyazaki, lead researcher on a $2.84-million University of Alberta study using computer-linked wrist monitors.

“Everybody is trying to miniaturize so their product is non-invasive, easy to manage and not so sensitive to the location of application.”

Miyazaki predicts that eventually, the new ring and wrist monitors will be replaced by biodegradable monitoring chips that can be inserted directly into the body.

“Wireless health care will become crucial in the future,” she says. “Overall, it will affect health-care expenses in crisis areas, meaning we can delay people getting sicker and reduce health-care dollars.”

For the past three years, NASA has been working on its own wearable health monitor. The crew physiological observation device, or CPOD, is a 2.1-ounce monitor that wraps around the waist and transmits astronauts’ health information to doctors in real time.

Similarly, a portable health-monitoring kit made by the Canadian company March Networks is now being used on a Mount Everest expedition. The telehealth equipment monitors the climbers’ vitals, stores the data on Bluetooth-enabled PDAs and transmits it via satellite to a website. (Bluetooth is a wireless technology that transmits data over short distances. The personal digital assistants, such as a Palm device, can be equipped to transmit data over long distances to the satellites.)

So far, none of the devices are being sold directly to patients. But Shaltis says they hope to have their medical mood ring commercialized and mass-produced within the next five years, at an estimated retail cost of a few hundred dollars per device.

When good phones go bad: portables that can kill

Sarah Staples

CanWest News Service

April 21, 2004

In two decades, the cellphone has evolved from a clunky thing complete with cumbersome battery pack to a ubiquitous consumer tool.

It has also emerged as a pre-eminent terror and counter-terrorism device, useful for the same reasons that make it a practical necessity, experts say.

Its use is all the more chilling because bombs designed to be triggered by cellular signal are technically difficult to disarm.

“It’s magnificent in terms of technology; versatile and attractive, very affordable and amazingly easy to get access to,” said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent who runs an Ottawa security consulting firm, The Northgate Group Corp.

“But the human brain is capable of twisting something good into something bad, and that’s what we see with the cellphone.”

With the number of cellphone subscribers now estimated at more than one billion worldwide, according to the wireless market researcher EMC, the phones offer terrorists the convenience of a weapon that can be used in plain view without raising the slightest suspicion.

Unlike alarm clocks, cellphones rigged to detonate when called offer the convenience of precision timing managed by remote control.

“What if you change your mind and want to set it five minutes later because there’s more people? With the cellphone, you’ve got the luxury to detonate at will,” said Juneau-Katsuya.

What sets cellphones apart from other everyday items is that, like the planes that were turned into weapons on Sept 11, 2001, they’re suited to the macabre business of inflicting mass casualties, he said.

To the terrorist the cellphone represents the ultimate in global reach: Anyone in the world can make the call that detonates a cellphone-rigged device. And unless security forces know the phone number, such a trigger is difficult to stop.

Cellphones have been exploited successfully by terror groups ranging from al-Qaida to Ireland‘s Real IRA. The bombs that exploded on Madrid commuter trains March 11, killing 191, were triggered by cellphones hidden in backpacks left on the trains — although in that case it was the internal alarm clock function of the phone, not its ringer, that functioned as the trigger.

Sony packs up the old TV into portable kit lighter than laptop

Vancouver Sun

April 21, 2004

Gizmo-crazed Vancouverites will soon be able to go gaga over Sony’s LocationFree portable TV system, available this fall.

Like something out of a 1940s science fiction story, the all-in-one entertainment device — with its 30-centimetre LCD touch screen monitor and base station — allows you to take your fun with you in an easily-totable package that costs a mere $2,499.

It weighs less than a laptop and once you set up this multi-tasking chameleon you can, using its graphical on-screen interface, watch television programs, flip through your digital photos and even take a look at streaming videos.

Also, you can go on the Internet, read your e-mail or even take a gander at your favourite website.

As well, you can listen to Internet radio.

According to Sony, the unique product is a fusion of traditional television and broadband technology.

“It’s a location-free TV that’s perfect for those without a laptop PC or who simply don’t want the hassle of complicated hookups, synching and downloading the way you must do now if you want mobile entertainment using PC-based systems,” said Sony of Canada’s, general manager, consumer display products, Toshi Matsuo.

The base station, which has an Ethernet jack for a direct connection to the Net, sends its signals to the monitor over a Wi-Fi connection, similar to the wireless ones used in today’s hot spots.

In addition to being a monitor, the touch screen unit — which has a built-in slot for Sony’s Memory Stick media — can display digital images, including videos.

For business travellers and road warriors, an additional smaller portable monitor will also be available that can be carried to the local coffee shop for browsing or to their hotel room. The wireless TV will be available in October.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

The main arteries of Water and Cordova will remain one-way

Michael McCullough
Sun

Starting this weekend, navigating Gastown will become easier for tourists and other out-of-towners, if a bit of an adjustment for commuters. And for Gastown merchants, it’s all for the best.

On Saturday, Carrall, Abbott and Cambie streets (the latter north of Dunsmuir only) will revert to two-way traffic as part of a city hall initiative to reduce travel distances and thereby cut down on airborne pollution.

“It just makes it that much easier to get into Gastown,” said Gastown Business Improvement Society president Jon Stovell.

For 20 years the historic neighbourhood has been a destination where people have to double back to get where they are going, and usually just end up parking in a parkade, said Stovell, who owns Reliance Holdings.

He expects the reconfiguration to have a similar positive impact to the recent provision for parking on Water Street outside of rush hours.

“People who have been down here for a long time like the Old Spaghetti Factory say this has done more than all the other initiatives over the years to improve the neighbourhood, and it hardly cost anything,” Stovell said of the street-parking experiment.

So far city hall has yet to hear a discouraging word from businesses in the area about the conversion of streets to two directions, echoed Downtown Transportation Plan implementation team member Nicky Hood. It will not result in any loss of street parking, she said, although a few spaces will be lost on Cambie to accommodate tour buses outside the new Storyeum attraction opening in June.

The historic district’s main arteries of Water and Cordova streets, and a single-block section of Carrall between the two, will remain one-way.

However, more extensive renovations than the 16 blocks affected in Gastown are coming this fall, when Homer, Beatty and Cambie south of Dunsmuir will also be changed to two-way traffic.

The Gastown Business Improvement Society wishes Water and Cordova could eventually go two ways as well, though city staff have credited those one-way routes for saving Gastown from a commuter freeway once proposed to access the downtown core.

“They did keep a freeway — it’s Water going west and Cordova going east,” Stovell quipped.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Earth orbiter will try to determine whether gravity does indeed bend time, space

Tom Spears
Sun

Canadian and U.S. scientists will spend the next year testing whether Einstein was right or wrong in thinking that Earth — and other heavenly bodies — bend space and time with their gravity.

Today NASA plans to launch the experiment that astrophysicists have been planning since 1958. They’ll send a three-tonne Thermos bottle of liquid helium into Earth’s orbit, where it will fly at twice the altitude of most space shuttles.

Monday’s planned launch was postponed because of high winds.

Watching the magnetic field of the spinning gyroscopes inside the probe will test whether space and time actually curve under Earth’s gravity. It’s the latest in nearly a century of experiments to test different aspects of Einstein’s revolutionary theory of relativity.

So far, these tests have found he was bang on.

The current understanding of gravity works well enough to predict movements in the solar system, says Michael Bietenholz, a York University astronomer involved in the new Gravity Probe B project.

But the solar system isn’t that big. The universe is so much larger that even the tiniest flaw in the theory would cause errors on a huge scale.

“It would be nice to send spaceships a billion light years away to make measurements, but we can’t,” he said. “The alternative is to try and measure very, very precisely, close to Earth to see if the theory holds up . . . . If it doesn’t agree then that’s a sign that the theory is wrong and we need a different picture.”

Most of the betting is that Einstein’s theory was right, he adds, “because it has stood up very well so far.”

Gravity B contains four gyroscopes, each a sphere of quartz the size of a tennis ball, coated with a superconductor metal and able to spin 10,000 times a minute. They are probably as close to round as anything ever made.

As these spin they produce a magnetic field, which shows scientists on Earth the exact axis of the spin. If the axis shifts, they believe, this will show where space and time are bending under the influence of Earth’s gravity.

As well, the international science group led by Stanford University hopes to find evidence of “frame dragging.” This means that Earth’s rotation makes time and space rotate with it — as theory says time and space swirl around the dense centre of a black hole.

These effects “are fairly obscure by layman’s standards. But it’s our theory of gravity, which is fundamental to our understanding of the universe,” Bietenholz said.

But all this depends on the ability of the satellite and its gyroscopes to point themselves in exactly the right direction. And Canada‘s role is to give the satellite something to aim at, like a ballerina who focuses on one spot in the room to keep her turns precise.

Einstein proposed general relativity — that space and time are affected by gravity — in 1915. But he became a worldwide celebrity four years later, when the solar eclipse of November 1919 gave scientists a chance to test his revolutionary ideas.

When the sun disappeared behind the moon, observers were able to chart the position of distant stars on the far side of the sun.

Their positions appeared just a tiny bit out of place — because their light was being bent by gravity as it passed close to our sun.

As in 1919, today’s test of Einstein has to focus on a distant star.

A star called IM Pegasi (in the constellation Pegasus) will be a reference point for the satellite, just as stars serve for navigation on Earth.

The problem is that stars move, and even a slow motion across the sky will confuse the satellite.

So a team at York University will “fix” the star, plotting its exact location as it travels so that the satellite can compare space near Earth with the fixed star. If the picture wobbles, that will show where space and time are bending around Earth.

Launching the experiment and running it for 16 months will cost $700 million US.

The much smaller Gravity A probe flew for just two hours in 1976.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Sun

VANCOUVER – Hastings Mill Store, the only building that was built before Vancouver‘s Great Fire of June 13th, 1886 that is still standing, endures as an important part of Vancouver‘s heritage.

Vancouver‘s first store and post office has been operated by its owners, the Native Daughters of B.C. Post No. 1, since 1930, when it was barged to its current site on Alma Road. Filled with artifacts of Vancouver‘s history, the museum provides a look at Vancouver‘s past.

You can be a part of preserving and sharing this vital part of Vancouver‘s history if you are a woman born in B.C. who’s over 18.

If you are interested in applying or want more information about Hastings Mill, please phone 604-986-0863.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

HERITAGE I The former Pantages is the oldest theatre in Western Canada

John Mackie
Sun

Two of Vancouver‘s most significant heritage buildings are being sold and may be restored to their former glory.

Condo king Bob Rennie has purchased the Wing Sang building at 51 East Pender, the oldest building in Chinatown, while Edmonton developer Worthington Properties is negotiating to purchase the former Pantages Theatre at 150 East Hastings. It’s the oldest theatre in western Canada.

The Wing Sang building dates to 1889, when Vancouver was only three years old. It was built by Chinatown patriarch Yip Sang.

Rennie plans a full heritage restoration of the brick structure, which is actually two buildings spread over three lots. The tentative plan is install his offices and an art gallery in the front building and convert the six-storey building in the rear to loft condos.

“It was an absolutely emotional purchase,” said Rennie, who says he has loved the building for years. “I was just at the front of the line and was willing to buy it with no survey, no seismic, no environmental, I just bought it.”

Rennie plans to team up with one of the developers he has worked with to complete the project.

“It will probably bankrupt me,” said Rennie, who paid $1 million for the building. “I was able to acquire the land, with a mortgage, but I’m not the guy who’s going in with a blank cheque.

“We are going to do it as an art form,” he laughed. “Which doesn’t make development sense.“

Worthington, meanwhile, is negotiating to buy the Pantages and four adjacent properties on East Hastings for an undisclosed amount. The 2004 property assessment for the five properties is $1,258,000, but the purchase price is likely closer to $2 million.

Worthington‘s Marc Williams said the company is exploring possibilities for the site, such as building high-rise housing. If it closes the deal, the Pantages will be restored.

“Certainly no matter what we’re going to do there, we’re going to be working to restore the Pantages,” said Williams.

It won’t be cheap. Williams said it may cost up to $3 million to restore the 1907-8 theatre, which had several names throughout its lifetime, including the Pantages, Royal, State, Queen, Avon, City Nights and Sung-Sing. The 620-seat venue has been closed since 1994.

The key to the Pantages deal is whether Worthington can come up with a plan for the four adjacent properties at 130, 132, 134 and 138 East Hastings. The buildings are small one and two-storey commercial properties which probably date from the early 1900s.

The most significant is 130 East Hastings, which was the home of the Blue Eagle Cafe from 1944 to 2000. The Blue Eagle had one of the city’s most famous neon signs, and elaborate interior tile, which may be from an earlier restaurant. Several were located there in the 1920s and ’30s, including the White Lunch, the Golden Gate Cafe and the New Atlantic Cafe.

Williams couldn’t say whether any facades might be retained in a new development.

“We still have to evaluate exactly what we can do and what would be the best use for the site,” said Williams. His company has worked with heritage properties in Edmonton, and also has done affordable housing projects and regular condos.

Worthington is doing another high-profile conversion in Gastown at the former Koret of California building at 55 East Cordova at Columbia.

The five-storey, 145,000-sq.-ft. structure was built in 1907 for McLennan McFeely and Co., a hardware company. A sixth storey will be added to bring the building to 167,000 sq. ft. during the conversion to commercial live/work studios. The former Canadian Pacific Railway behind the building will become green space.

Williams said 118 units will be available in the $30 million project, ranging in size from 670 to 2,000 sq. ft. They will cost from $200,000 to over $1 million. The lofts go on sale today.

A third historic building at 1 West Pender, at Carrall, has been purchased by investment analyst and Simon Fraser University chancellor Milton Wong for $1.5 million.

It was built in 1901 as the Chinese Freemasons Building, but Wong’s interest in it comes from the fact his father’s business, Modernize Tailors, began there in the early 1900s and remained there 50 years until it moved to 511 Carrall.

Milton Wong was unavailable for comment. But his elder brother Bill — an 82-year-old who still runs Modernize Tailors with his 80-year-old sibling Jack — said the family is pleased with the purchase.

“The family has an attachment to it,” said Bill Wong. “It makes more sense for him to buy the building than anybody else. I’m glad he bought the building. Hopefully he can do something with it.”

Rennie also feels an emotional bond to his new building. He grew up in East Vancouver and was always fascinated with the Wing Sang building, a distinctive structure with a unique second-storey door to nowhere facing the street. It used to be a loading door.

“This is absolutely personal,” he said. “It’s one I’ve always sort of driven by and followed. I was told it was sold, and then in the middle of selling 493 suites [in one day] at Yaletown Park, the realtor phoned and said ‘You have until five o’clock.’ So I met him at Starbucks on Robson at five o’clock and stepped up.”

Rennie believes Chinatown is on the cusp of renewal — “I think that Chinatown is five minutes away from coming back” — and he wants to be part of it.

“You know, there’s something very satisfying about being part of the restoration of Chinatown. I think what’s going to save it is to have people walking the streets that live and work in the area, and start walking across the street for coffee and actually using the area, rather than just driving there and going home.

“It has to be restored. It’s not whether we should or we shouldn’t, I just think that if we participate in this city, we should be part of the restoration of Chinatown.”

That is music to the ears of Carol Lee, the daughter of real estate tycoon Bob Lee and granddaughter of Chinatown legend Lee Bick. A year ago Lee moved her office to her grandfather’s old headquarters in a 1907 building at 127 East Pender, determined to help Chinatown come back.

“I’m very much committed to the neighbourhood,” said Lee. “This is a long-term process of revitalization. I don’t think anything is going to happen overnight, but it’s great that people are coming down here. I think it’s great Bob bought the building.”

Bill Wong is encouraged by all the real estate action. He also seems happy with the gentrification of nearby Strathcona neighbourhood, which he still calls by its original name, the East End.

“I notice a lot of professional people are buying houses down at the East End there,” he said. “They want to be close to downtown, close to where the action is, to BC Place and Stanley Park.”

But he cautions Chinatown won’t come back overnight.

“It will be very slow, it won’t be fast,” he said. “It’s a gradual process.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

HISTORY I Yip Sang was involved in recruiting many of the labourers who helped build the railway

John Mackie
Sun

The Wing Sang building was built in 1889 by Yip Sang, a Chinatown merchant who had a long and prosperous association with the Canadian Pacific Railway — he was involved in recruiting many of 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese labourers who helped build it.

After the railway was completed Yip built an empire out of an import-export business, the Wing Sang Company. His building was the unofficial bank of Chinatown, where workers could send money to relatives in China and book passage on steamships to the homeland.

The original two-storey brick building was added to in 1901 and 1912, so it extends over four lots and includes a three-storey building in the front, a six-storey building in the back and 40,000 square feet of space. The rear building was built to house Yip’s large family — he had four wives and 23 children. One of his sons, Dock Yip, was the first Chinese-Canadian lawyer in Canada. Another, Quene, was a soccer star.

The Wing Sang building houses all sorts of historical quirks. The main floor of the 1889 building is a few steps below street level because it was built before the street was paved. The second floor now has a door to nowhere, but originally it could be opened and goods hoisted into the warehouse upstairs.

You enter the back building via an alley just to the west of the building, or through an elevated walkway that connects the third floor of the front building to the fourth floor of the one behind. But you can’t see the rear building from the street, because there is a small wooden facade blocking off the alley.

The front building is in remarkable shape, with upper floors that could be straight out of 1889: Floor-to-ceiling wainscotting, century-old linoleum and even a blackboard where Yip Sang’s children studied their lessons. But someone has stolen the fir flooring in the second storey because the old wood is now worth a small fortune. The back building has been vacant since 1975 when the city brought in bylaws that would have required the Yip family to spend a prohibitive amount of money on upgrades. Pigeons have infested every square inch of the place.

The Yip family sold the building in 2001.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004

Sun

The Pantages Theatre was built in 1907-8 by show-biz legend Alexander Pantages, and is the oldest survivor of a chain of 70 vaudeville houses that stretched across North America.

Pantages Theatres were known for their opulence and several have been restored in recent years, including the Pantages Playhouse in Winnipeg (built in 1914), the Pantages in Toronto (1920) and the Pantages at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles (1930). The Hollywood Pantages was the original home of the Academy Awards.

Pantages built his Vancouver theatre in the heart of the city’s then commercial and entertainment district. There were 10 theatres on Hastings near Main just after the turn of the last century, including the Rex, the Regal, the National, the Columbia, the Empire, the Majestic, the Province, the Princess, the Crystal, the Empress and the Pantages.

The opening night program on Jan. 7, 1908, included Wallace, “the untamable lion”; vaudevillians Bunth and Rudd; the Rusticana Trio, “Italian street singers”; comedians Mr. and Mrs. Chick; B.B. Vincent, a “pleasing baritone,” and musicians Davey and Everson.

Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy are said to have graced the Pantages stage.

In 1917 Pantages built a second, grander theatre at 20 West Hastings and sold his original theatre. It was converted to a movie house in the late 1920s, and in the early 1930s survived a fire in the projectionist’s booth. In 1933, someone threw a bomb into the theatre during a labour meeting, damaging the lobby.

Alexander Pantages recruited some of his family members to move to Vancouver to run his theatres, and the Vancouver branch is still thriving. One of his cousins, Peter, started the New Year’s Polar Bear Swim in 1920, and Pantages family members are still involved in the event.

The theatre has been closed since 1994. It last operated as the Sung Sing, a Chinese-language theatre, but has had several names over its lifetime — the Pantages, Royal, State, Queen, Avon and City Nights.

The interior of the theatre is a bit rough, with some water damage from a leaky roof and lots of peeling paint. All the seats have been removed. But the grandeur of the vaudeville palace is easy to see in the soaring proscenium arch that frames a stage and the ornate golden decorative work on the walls.

The building was sold in 1999 to the Pantages Preservation Society, a non-profit group headed by video and music producers Dana Barnaby and Shayne Wilson. They couldn’t come up with the money to restore it, and it sat empty until it was once again listed for sale.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004