Tech Trends: A look into the latest dental and general technology on the market

Anura (Free, Nuralogix)

Nuralogix, a company based in Toronto, has developed a general wellness app called Anura, which uses its “affective” artificial intelligence (AI) technology based on transdermal optical imaging (TOI) to provide common health indicators with only a 30-second smartphone selfie from an iOS or Android device.

Anura is not a substitute for a diagnosis from a qualified health care professional. However, with Anura, the power of AI can potentially provide some health insights for those unable to immediately see a health care professional. Signing up for an account, which unlocks all the features of the app, requires some personal profile health data and gives consent to collect data obtained to provide core services. The main screen shows live video from the selfie camera and a circular outline where users center their face. Once the app automatically locks in on the face, visual cues are provided as it starts analyzing facial characteristics to determine health indicators, which include heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and many other measurements. During the analysis, the circular outline becomes a timer indicating how long the user must maintain their face centered in the camera, which is 30 seconds or less. When the analysis is complete, data is sent to Nuralogix for processing and results are instantly returned on the screen.

In addition to vital sign measurements, the app displays other wellness information from its analysis, including heart rate variability, cardiac workload, stress index, body mass index, facial skin age, waist-to-height ratio and body shape index. Users can reference a history of past measurements to track trends. A special mode can also be used to take measurements of friends on the same device without recording results to the logged in account profile. It is entirely the responsibility of the end user to decide how to use the wellness information provided by the app, but it is impressive to see how these metrics are easily obtained with only a 30-second selfie.

— Hubert Chan, DDS

Microsoft Power Automate

(License starts at $15 per user per month, Microsoft)

Microsoft has been at the forefront of productivity software for years thanks to its suite of Office products like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While these applications are still and will most likely remain mainstays in professional settings, Microsoft has made a concerted effort to expand the usefulness of its products with modern offerings like PowerApps, Sharepoint and OneDrive. Tying all these applications (and many others) together is Microsoft Power Automate, a subscription-based service that helps users “create automated workflows between … apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data and more.” Power Automate is the integration point, the “middle person” who passes information from one to another. It is a challenging application to use, but the rewards are well worth the headaches.

Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, Microsoft Power Automate is a pay-as-you-go web service that appears in the Microsoft Portal upon activation. It has a host of prebuilt capabilities out of the box such as sending emails when an entry in Excel is detected, requesting approval for items in a SharePoint list and instantly blocking out all calendars for a specific time range. These seemingly trivial actions can be chained together in Power Automate to moderate and perform complex tasks. For example, utilizing the aforementioned prebuilt capabilities, users create an Excel spreadsheet that controls their practice’s time-off requests. Power Automate monitors a spreadsheet, sends approval notifications to managers when a new entry is made or modified and then blocks out the employee if the request is approved. This information can then be attached to payroll processes and even electronic health records for greater utility.

Unfortunately, Power Automate is not for the beginner, as a functional command of modern programming principles is required; in fact, Power Automate can overwhelm intermediate and advanced users due to its multitude of idiosyncrasies and bugs.

— Alexander Lee, DMD