Body-worn sensors used at home and in clinic by people with mild Alzheimer's to assess walking could offer a cost-effective way to detect early disease and monitor progression of the illness. A pilot study involving Newcastle University, UK, has revealed low-cost wearable devices could improve clinical trial efficiency and encourage research investment. Identification of clinical biomarkers, such as changes in walking characteristics and behaviours, are known to be important factors when looking at early warning signs of dementia.

Automated breast-density evaluation was just as accurate in predicting women's risk of breast cancer, found and not found by mammography, as subjective evaluation done by radiologists, in a study led by researchers at UC San Francisco and Mayo Clinic. Both assessment methods were equally accurate in predicting both the risk of cancer detected through mammography screening and the risk of interval invasive cancer - that is, cancer diagnosed within a year of a negative mammography result.

The European Commission is putting forward a set of measures to increase the availability of data in the EU, building on previous initiatives to boost the free flow of non-personal data in the Digital Single Market. Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of market growth, job creation, particularly for SMEs and startups, and the development of new technologies.

A new method has been developed to make drugs 'smarter' using nanotechnology so they will be more effective at reaching their target. Scientists from the University of Lincoln, UK, have devised a new technique to 'decorate' gold nanoparticles with a protein of choice so they can be used to tailor drug to more accurately target an area on the body, such as a cancer tumour.

The new technology has been developed jointly by teams headed by Prof Dr Georg Schmitz at the Chair for Medical Engineering at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and by Prof Dr Fabian Kiessling at the Institute for Experimental Molecular Imaging at the University Hospital Aachen. They published their report in the journal Nature Communications from April 18, 2018.

From live-streaming funerals to online memorial pages and even chat-bots that use people's social media footprints' to act as online ghosts, the digital afterlife industry (DAI) has become big business. Our internet activity, commonly referred to as digital remains, lives on long after we die. In recent years, as firms such as Facebook and experimental start-ups have sought to monetize this content by allowing people to socialise with the dead online, the boundaries around acceptable afterlife activity and grief exploitation, have become increasingly blurry.

Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that deep learning, a powerful form of artificial intelligence, can discern and enhance microscopic details in photos taken by smartphones. The technique improves the resolution and color details of smartphone images so much that they approach the quality of images from laboratory-grade microscopes.