Now its time for click. This week new ways to measure your vital signs to the doctor. Hey, welcome to click hope youre well. Hope youre coping ok with the not going out, the not seeing people, the Home Schooling and that long wait for the vaccine. Theres a heck of a lot going on at the moment, isnt there . Lara, it looks like youve been keeping busy. Youve been decorating look i have i hope you like them ive got to keep myself busy in lockdown. Absolutely no, they look lovely thank you i tell you, its the most exciting thing to happen in the lewington household for months now, of course, we are being encouraged to stay at home as much as possible, except in particular circumstances and that includes if you need medical attention. That said, at the moment in the uk, most Gp Appointments are happening remotely, so that may be by telephone or online. But, of course, there are some examinations that really need to take place in person, so ive been looking at some of the technology that aims to be able to help you do them yourself. Health tracking devices are not new especially those used to monitor chronic conditions. But the pandemic has encouraged the rise of Innovative New kit. Or sometimes, all you need is your smartphone. This app from binah. Ai uses the camera built into your smartphone, tablet or laptop to measure your vital signs in under a minute, just by looking at your face. So binah is actually actually analysing the tiny colour changes that are happening in your cheeks and forehead, and those tiny colour changes actually provide a clear indication regarding the blood flow behind your skin and by analysing the blood flow, then we are able to analyse and to understand what is your heart rate, what is your oxygen saturation, what is your respiration rate, and a lot of different body signs. Over 100 million scans have already been done and thousands of doctors have been trialling the tool whilst it applies for widespread approvals. But to get a Second Opinion and one from an actual doctor i drafted in clare gerada, gp and former chair of the Royal College of general practitioners. So under your skin, you have got millions of very small Blood Vessels and what this technology will be doing, no doubt, is actually pinning one of those down and picking up these various indices. Another smartphone based solution could be this. Lmds tiny device can track your Blood Pressure just by holding your finger down on it. Its sensors track the pressure that you are putting on, along with what the vessels look like under the skin. But the eventual aim is to have this built into mobile phones. When you measure your Blood Pressure with a normal cuff around your arm what it does is squeeze and compress the arm against the pressure of the blood. We do exactly the same, except we use the arteries here in the tip of the finger. And when you put your finger on the device, like that, it tells you on the screen to push harder or softer. It did take quite a few goes to get a reading, but the company is improving its set of simple games to help you focus on getting it right, and Clinical Trials are under way. Youve mentioned how beneficial this could be to people who know they need to be taking their Blood Pressure readings, but how about Healthy People . It would be very, very useful to be picking up people that we dont normally see in our surgery, till they run into problems. Sometimes your phone may need a bit of help, though. This smartphone connected device helps to aim you when youre having a remote doctors appointment. Now, it comes with attachments that help you look inside your ear or inside your throat, even a stethoscope, plus simpler functions by being able to take your temperature. An app helps you record your findings and send them to a doctor. Or if your Healthcare Provider is signed up, you can do live video calls when they take control. Heart is awesome lets go to spot 2. Ah, great go directly across. A lot of schools around the us and europe are starting to use tyto as a mini clinic. We have visiting Nurses Services that they are using tyto, so it is not always at the home level, it is also the community level. Tytocare has been clinically validated by universities and hospitals in the us and israel. Its also been trialled by the uks National Health service. But not everyone is convinced that parents should be buying their own 300 device. What do you think of a device like this which actually takes on some of the physical elements of what a doctor would generally need to do . I think that if you are a worried parent, number one you probably would not have one. If you are anxious, where youre looking for the bits in the midst of being unwell, i think you wont find theres much usage. Where it may be useful is if we are trying to monitor a patient at home. So if i have seen a patient, say, on a friday morning and im a little bit concerned is this child unwell or not unwell . I might give lend a patient� s parents that machine and then have much more detail about the patient� s condition. But moving forward, do you think that these things are still going to stay with us . There will be as much enthusiasm in the future . Covid has really done a paradigm shift. Saying that, i dont ever think it will get beyond 60 of consultations will start and finish online. I think there will still be a large number of patients that see their Doctor Face To face for all sorts of reasons. All around the world, medical staff are having the toughest time trying to deal with a virus that attacks the body in new ways. Patients on ventilators need to be heavily sedated whilst a lot of machinery is used to monitor their vitals to allow doctors to respond appropriately at the right time. Well, paul carter has this report from madrid, where medics have been showing us how they have taken some existing technology and used it in new ways to help improve survival rates. Like many countries around the world, spains Intensive Care Units are dealing with high numbers of cases of covid i9. At two hospitals in madrid, they are making use of a system that can help monitor critically ill patients. It monitors a persons Autonomic Nervous System which unconsciously regulates body processes including breathing, Blood Pressure and heart rate. It enables doctors to see at a glance the levels of pain or distress a patient may be in while sedated. This is the intensive Care Department of Puerta De Hierro hospital. Right now in this room, we have i covid i9 patients. The systems are really easily applied. For the pain monitor, its just two stickers that are going to register the activity, the electrical activity of the heart, and they are attached by this really simple cable to the monitor. It gives you mainly two numbers. Theres one number that correlates with the immediate pain of the patient. And there is a second number that is a median of the different pain scores that the machine has recorded for the last three minutes. It has helped us because it is really simple to interpret. You walk into the room and you exactly know if your patient is in pain or not and it makes it easier to adjust the pain medication. Because we are always in fear that our patients might suffer pain, but we also need to realise that its very important for them to not be overdosed on opioids. Doctors say pain levels would normally be measured by assessing a number of measurements separately, while the system in use here allows for greater detail. The challenge for doctors is finding the right balance between keeping a patient comfortable while still enabling their Nervous System to help the body fight back against the effects of the virus. Translation at the severe stages of the disease, when Artificial Respiration is needed, it is necessarily heavily sedate and even paralyse the patient. The key is to anaesthetise the patient. This does not mean to switch their brain off, but to reduce Brain Activity and that is why this technology is so important, because it allows us to control the amount of sedation on analgesia, avoiding both overdosing and underdosing. This system does not replace the role of drugs and other types of therapies available to treat the sickest of patients. Rather, it is an additional tool in the arsenal available to Intensive Care doctors as we continue to learn more about treating this illness. Hello and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week that facebook news, the social media giants personalised news tool, launched in the uk following a us Roll Out Last year. German drone firm wingcopter said it will start delivering coronavirus vaccines by air, with pilots launching in South East Asia and africa in the coming months. And google stopped work on its virtual painting app tilt brush. Launched in 2016, this will live on as an open source project. Fords Electric Scooter Arm Spin unveiled a new three wheeled model. A fleet of up to 300 scooters will be piloted in idaho this spring, complete with controls that let vehicles be moved from afar, and even wheeled to users on demand. The makers of Humanoid Droid Sophia the robot say this and three other models are going into mass production. Hello, everyone. Sophia can imitate Human Gestures and uses ai for general reasoning and went viral when unveiled by Hanson Robotics in 2016. And finally, the hip bones connected to the. 3d printer . Scientists in australia have made an ink that can 3d print bone like structures with living cells. The ceramic based fluid must be squeezed into a gel bath with cells to set, and could mend damaged bones during surgery. Now, thats what i call � bone fide science last monday was burns night, when scots everywhere celebrate the birth, life and poetry of their national bard, robert burns. Yeah, he wrote, amongst some other things, this. For auld lang syne. Auld lang syne, of course traditionally sung on new years eve hogmanay if you are in scotland. And in scotland right now is our very nick kwek hello, nick look at you well, hello there hows it going . You alright . Yes, i am in Bonny Scotland and of course, i am wearing traditional garb. Yeah, keep that well under wraps, if you would not mind, sir. Listen, where are you . Well, im in the one place many a scot hold dear to their heart the whisky distillery laughter. I cant wait to tuck into some of that later on. But anyway, as it is burns night, it is the one time of the year where it is socially acceptable to drink whisky with your dinner. I see how was your burns night . Well it was pretty bizarre, to be honest. It went virtual for the first, and hopefully the last time, and obviously, there is a lot of people up here with a lot of time on their hands, so one phd student from glasgow decided to train an al to write poetry in the style of the great bard himself. Ok, can we hear a bit of that now . Reads poem. Wow tech meets tradition speaking of which spencer, youve been testing some whisky that was blended by an Artificial Intelligence . Yeah, thats right and this is being made in the Traditional Home of whisky, sweden. What . ok, look, sweden is actually very new to whisky making. A couple of hours north of stockholm in the town of gavle, ifound angela dorazio. Now, she is mackmyra whisky� s master blender, although i prefer her other title, cno chief nose officer and she is going to explain how her latest gold Award Winning whisky was given a helping hand well, or nose by a computer. The Distilling Process that you see behind me, that is where we start. That is something that gives us the clear stuff that looks like water that is very strong its about 70 of alcohol. The taste of the new made spirit have a malty character. Then you also get the taste from the stuff that ferments it, so the yeast that we are using is the same yeast that everybody bakes with in sweden, sweet cakes, and we get a very fruity, light kind of fruity aromatic tone from the yeast. After distillation, the liquid is aged for years in oak casks, where it absorbs the flavour from the wood. Slowly, slowly, the alcohol evaporates from this living material that oak is. You get the taste of the oak and the colour of the oak. But the next part of angelas job where she decides how to blend the contents of different casks together became the subject of a Machine Learning experiment. When i make a blend, i have an idea of what i will use and then i test blend it, so i might take a base of bourbon and then i will take a few samples of something else. So i will do a complexity of tastes and aromas in this blend. And then i can see i used to much of that new american oak. I can see in this blend, i will have to use a little less of that and that process can take days and weeks. So tech start up fourkind offered to create software to see if a computer could do the blending job instead. All the info about her previous recipes, cask information, tasting notes, reviews and awards were fed into the algorithm to see if it could come up with a new blend also worthy of a prize. The a program gave me very many recipe suggestions, which in the beginning were very strange and very odd and not at all something i would like to use. For example, it said use very little from 500 casks and that is like not a thing that you would do. So we narrowed down the possibilities while we went along and i got a hundred recipes and i looked at them and said no, then i got a hundred more then a hundred more, and then in the end, i singled out five recipes that i thought were nice. The result is a whisky called intelligens what else. And it did win two awards in the us. So is it any good . Im not really into whisky so i had a bottle sent to someone with a much better sense of it all than me my dad. He got the taste buds and i got the hair. The colour is certainly a whisky colour. Laughs. Intelligens is not meant to taste like any other whisky in particular but i did ask dad how it compared to his favourite Scottish Single malt. Definitely a more concentrated flavour. Whereas this one. Fuller. He coughs a fuller flavour. But its enjoyable, you couldnt drink much of it i dont think. At the moment there are no plans to make another batch. Good news for Human Master Blenders i feel, but bad news for my dad because he wont get any more whisky to try for a while. Back home im at the glenturret, the oldest distillery in scotland, a title fiercely defended. Here they certainly like to do things the Old Fashioned way. Its the last remaining Scottish Distillery to rouse mash by hand. Weavers are pulled and pipes manually positioned to fill the handcrafted wooden wash bags. You see the passion that goes into it, the blood sweat and tears that goes into making the whisky, and you can feel it, almost smell in the whisky. Cutting, is a process affecting the Alcohol Percentage and spirit clarity, is done by eye. Brian knows when the time is just right. The spirits safe is so ancient, the workers do not know how old it is. They think it is half a century or so. When it comes to casks, individually nosed and sniffed before collected, an instinct fine tuned over decades. Most importantly, they have got two cats on resident, so there are no mouse loose about this house. As if sweden wasnt enough, but imagine the reaction when i told the manager here about Silicon Valley concocting the drinks in labs. It goes against all the grains of my body i have to say, to do that. I think there is a lot of romance in it, that is for sure, but once you come to a place like this and look around an open these casks and you smell them, can you replicate that in a laboratory . I certainly dont think so. Well, James Clayton has been to visit a team in california reducing the secret Ageing Process down to a handful of days. Welcome to the Bespoken Spirits, a number of small start ups on a mission to revolutionise the spirits industry. I met martin and stu, the founders of the company. A couple of different samples and were looking at the some of the attributes of aroma. This has more of that furfural than this one does so this one will have more of a nuttiness than this one. Another one might have higher amounts of vanillin than another one which means it will have a higher smell or taste of vanilla. So you can be that exact . Exactly. Those are things we can engineer in each subsequent iteration of the recipe. Whisky making is a bit of a science but here they have taken that to a whole new level. Here, stu explains the process from start to finish. We have three Main Elements that we use creating those recipes. The first is the source spirit itself, the second element is the wood, and here what we do is we operate with what we call microstaves, which are small pieces of wood. And each microstaves is roughly one 25,000th the size of a barrel and we start with adding an extra microstaves. We can mix and match these microstaves to get the recipes we want, kind of like spices. And then when we have that Microstaves Mixture selected, we then choose how were going to toast and char those microstaves. Then we take it and put them together in our machine which we call the activator, then we can control the environment in the machine to precisely influence when and how the chemical reactions occur. We have over 17 billion combinations we can use in creating our recipes, and it typically takes three . Five days to get the end result we are looking for. Some of the process uses technology they say is market sensitive that they wouldnt show me. But they claim that the spirits they make, things like whisky and rum, arejust as good as the real thing. We have got three different samples here of our bespoken products here. This was our original flagship product, the first product we made and the first to win industry awards. This is a japanese style whisky in the sense that it is more floral and aromatic and fruity, whereas this one is more of a classic urban style whisky, vanilla and caramel and woody notes. I will try this. Im getting nuts from this, is that a thing . Is it nutty . Is it . We are not making synthetic spirits here, werejust controlling the traditional elements in the traditional process in a very precise way to get precise results, and thereby unlock so much more power and craft to the distillery. Today on the whiskyjug, were going to be doing the last class review of the. Ok, so im clearly not a spirits expert Byjosh Peters is. Hes a respected whisky expert and writes the whiskyjug blog. He believes this kind of technology can make good spirits but when it comes to replicating the Ageing Process, its not quite there. Im yet to have a whisky from one of these that i thought tasted like a true oak aged spirit. I have had some great rums though. Things like rums, underaged products, end up tasting very good. But anything that requires that barrel ageing, i have yet to have anything that replicates or comes even close to it. They will probably do very well with things like cocktails. You can make some really cool and interesting things with them but i dont think theyre going to be replacing the liquid that i want to, at the end of the day, pour into a glass and drink on its own. Companies like Bespoken Spirits dont actually need to convince everyone theyre onto a winner. Theyre looking for a fraction of a multibillion dollar industry. If they can convince just i of people who drink spirits that this is the future, theyll be cheersing to that. That was James Clayton in Silicon Valley and i would imagine that report has annoyed a lot of people. Lets go back to nick in scotland who is. Oh, not there right now. Oh no, what have we done, where is he . Right, does anybody have a straw . Oh, thats it, i dont know when were going to see nick again. Maybe next burns night or the morning after. That is it from us for now. As ever, you can keep up with the team on social media, find us on youtube, instagram, facebook and twitter at bbc click. Thanks for watching, well see you soon. Bye bye. Hello there. Winter is about to ramp up to another gear by the end of this week, certainly into the weekend. Itll be turning much colder with the risk of some disruptive snow in places. So for the next few days, itll gradually be turning colder for all, and well see increasing snow particularly over the hills in the north. Now for thursday, weve still got low pressure close by to the uk, its the Weather Front across the north bringing further cloud, outbreaks of rain to northern ireland, much of scotland, Northern England too, and here well see further snow over the scottish hills accumulating and drifting in that strong east southeast wind. Further south, after a bright start to the day, well start to see showery bursts of rain moving up from the south. Here, itll tend to be fairly mild, 8 10 celsius, but very cold across the north where we have that snow. Through thursday night, it continues with rain and the snow across scotland significant accumulations over the grampians and the highlands, very wet weather with a risk of flooding. Further south, a drier night to come and clear skies, could see some mist and fog across southern england, and again, a big temperature contrast from north to south. Now the snow continues as we head on into friday and saturday significant accumulations have prompted the met office to issue an Amber Warning for this heavy, incessant snow. And also, some very heavy rain for lower levels could cause some localised flooding so a whole host of issues there. Further west, well have sunny spells, a few showers, tends to stay dry across the far south east again, 9 10 celsius, much colder further north where it will also be windy with that drifting snow in the hills. Moving on into the weekend, our area of low pressure sinks a bit further southwards, so it means the rain and the hill snow across Scotland Will Drift into parts of Northern England at times too, so a whole wintry mix here could be disruptive. Further south, quite a bit of cloud around with outbreaks of rain, and temperatures dropping generally across the board. Still cold in the north and a little bit colder for much of england and wales, too. As we head on into sunday, the very cold air across the east pushes southwards right across the uk, and itll be very windy, so the wind making it feel even colder 2 3 celsius, some snow pushing into northern and eastern areas which could be disruptive. So turning very cold through this weekend for all areas, with the risk of some disruptive snow for some of us. This is bbc news, our top stories protests continue in myanmar as the un calls for the release of leader aung san suu kyi, whos been charged by police, following mondays military coup. Future proofing the covid vaccine, how scientists are already working to make sure the new vaccines can be adapted to deal with any new variant. Hospitals in portuhgal are struggling, as the country suffers some of the worlds highest rates of new covid infections. A 22 year old american who had the worlds first face and hands transplant, talks about his surgery, saying he feels grateful for a Second Chance at life. Three female directors make history by being nominated for a golden globe awards, the first time more than one has been shortlisted in a single year