Wii is great for rehabilitation

Not only is the Wii game system a great source for entertainment but it is becoming a therapeutic aid helping with patient rehabilitation. WakeMed hospitals in North Carolina has begun to use the Wii to help with patient therapy. "Patients become vested in it, and when they're vested it has a lot more meaning," says Karen Ambrose, a physical therapist at the hospital. "If you can get them to want to do it," she says of the often grueling process of physical rehabilitation, "they'll do it."

One of the problems in getting rehab patients to become more involved in recovery is getting them to buy in to physical therapy. After that they can move forward in their recovery process.

According to the recent News and Observer report, the first hospital thought to have used the Wii for rehab is the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. But WakeMed's Recreational Therapy Department heard about it from their person that delivers wheelchairs - he mentioned that "he had a Wii and thought the movement aspect might translate well to rehab".

News and Observer
July 12, 2007
Joe Miller, Staff Writer

The therapeutic Wii
Nintendo game system helps patients rehabilitate after injury or illness

It took a car accident and the onset of Parkinson's disease, but 68-year-old Nathan Woodlief may finally have a chance at beating his grandson at video games.
"He laughs at me," Woodlief says of the response his woeful performance elicits.

Junior may not be laughing, though, when Gramps returns from the hospital empowered by the device that nursed him back to health: the Nintendo Wii.

Wii? Oui.

The video game that couldn't stay on store shelves at Christmas is fast earning a second life as a useful tool in helping victims of debilitating diseases and accidents get back on their feet. Read more...

Are we becoming addicted to the internet and gadgets?

An interesting debate topic is brewing as to whether the internet and gadgets have become addictive. Certainly at times it seems some folks may be of this persuasion but there is no real proof this is a problem - at least for now...

An interesting article posted July 3, 2007, on CNN discusses this question.

The article suggests gadget and internet addiction "could be said to be part of a serious current debate -- the debate over whether technology addiction, and especially Internet addiction, is a real mental disorder". The article further states "At its annual conference last month, members of the American Medical Association considered a proposal to label excessive video and online game playing as an addiction, but decided to table it until further study".

CNN Online
July 3, 2007
Jonathan Mandell

Are gadgets, and the internet, actually addictive?

CNN - When the users of BlackBerries could not send or receive e-mails for 11 hours in April because of a glitch in the system, hospital administrator Paul Levy pronounced it a "national disaster" because of all the BlackBerry "addicts" forced into withdrawal.

Writing in his blog, Levy -- the president of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts -- proclaimed himself proud of the swift actions of his hospital.

"We set up our crisis center ... staffed by our Psychiatry Department," Levy wrote. "Cases of withdrawal were handled ... with a minimal use of antidepressant drugs." The one downside, he wrote, were the "damaged walls and broken windows" because of the "many devices ... vigorously thrown."

Levy was joking. There was no activity in his hospital as a result of the BlackBerry blackout, other than some whining from BlackBerry-obsessed colleagues.

But his satire could be said to be part of a serious current debate -- Read more...

PC Magazine NoteWhen 2

As a past user of real 3M PostIt Notes and the PostIt Notes software I didn't think there would be a better substitute any time soon. Then I found PC Magazine's NoteWhen 2 software. The magazine offers Other utilities for adding functionality, managing and monitoring your PC, etc., all available for a minimal price or within the annual subscription fee of $19.97 on the annual utility signup page.

The program is a little like using real PostIt Notes but is software based and sits on your PC's desktop. Whenever you want to create a new note just click on the icon on the bottom taskbar area and then type in the new note. The new note pops up on your screen set to the same size and color as the previous note. You can then change various settings for the new note or go with how it was created. You can change the note color, size (it stretches), font and position on the screen. The program remembers settings as you make them and new notes will be similar until you change the settings again.

PC Magazine's annual utility membership is a steal and you get unlimited access for all utilities released during that year. Usually any one of them is worth the cost of the annual membership.

Give it a try! You will find the utilities provide some of the missing features you might wish for and will find they almost always provide a very useful add-on to your library of PC tools.

Proposed new search engine - making internet searches more precise

Jimmy Wales, the person that brought you Wikipedia, is talking about building a new internet search engine. The idea is to create a search engine "whose output is continually refined by user participation, just as Wikipedia theoretically gets better as users spot and correct errors".

If you haven't looked at Wikipedia, it's an internet based dynamic encyclopedia that allows users world wide to add and refine content in real time and theoretically gets better continuously. You can find most any topic in Wikipedia and generally the information is on target and kept up to date by the user base. It is self policed by the users and content that is unclear or erroneous gets corrected by the user base.

Read the article on the proposed new search engine...

News and Observer
March 21, 2007
Paul Gilster

Making searches more precise

Jimmy Wales, the man responsible for the Wikipedia collaborative encyclopedia, is talking about building a better search engine.

Wales' company, Wikia (www.wikia.com), uses many of Wikipedia's user-involved techniques to host publishing sites on a wide range of topics. What he seems to have in mind is a search engine whose output is continually refined by user participation, just as Wikipedia theoretically gets better as users spot and correct errors.

Just how this will play out is unclear, because Wikipedia remains controversial. Unlike the Encyclopedia Britannica, which draws on the work of experts, Wikipedia is open to contributions from anyone on the Net. Read more...