Right time, right place - new diagnostic devices

In watching advances in medical devices, it's obvious the trend is pushing devices out into patients hands. This allows diagnostic tests to happen when they are needed during the patients normal life, rather than simply at the point of care. This allows right time diagnostics. For other patients isn't the necessity of catching a problem at the right time, but getting the diagnostic devices to where the patient is, rather than the patient coming to the diagnostics. This allow devices to be in the right place.

This is enabled by the ubiquity of smartphones - capable computers which disguise themselves as consumer communications devices. In this arena, there is a recently introduced ECG device from Sanatmetal called WIWE. It communicates via Bluetooth to the users smartphone, which provides the visual output and feedback as well as communications back to the clinicians who will use the data collected. This is a good example of creating a "Right Time" diagnostic tool. It's only a single lead ECG, but it is enough to capture a fleeting bout of cardiac arrhythmia. Often an in-clinic ECG offers no tell-tales of arrhythmia's and the other options are longer term portable monitoring (such as a Holter) and hope.

An example of a "Right Place" diagnostic tool, is a handheld colposcope for cervical screening. This is an easily portable device, that again relies on a smartphone. Cervical cancer screening and detection is much lower in places where the few fixed colposcopes are difficult for women to access. This mobile device also simplifies testing, ideally making it easier, more comfortable and less error-prone.

For details on the ECG collection device, you can see the WIWE website: http://mywiwe.com/en/
For details on the cervical screening device, see the Duke university site: http://pratt.duke.edu/about/news/ditch-the-speculum.

Comments

Unit Testing - What to Test

This I wrote to answer a question that came up when we were discussing our software process and I was training developers on how to unit test. It seems a simple enough question, but I kept pondering it and delving deeper until I realized I needed to write this monograph. What unit tests should we write? How do we know what to test? Ideally, unit tests should cover every path through the code. It should be your chance to see every path through your code works as expected and as needed. If you are practicing Test Driven Development then it's implied everything gets a test. In the real world, you might not be allowed to test everything - for instance, if the testing suite ends up taking a week to run, then the world will have changed by the time it finishes and the test results will be obsolete. Unit testing at it's basic is testing an object, a method - the smallest unit of your code that it can test independently. It should test the inputs "goes into" an

Healthcare and Health Informatics Glossary

Here is a glossary of terms useful in Healthcare and Health Informatics ACO (Accountable Care Organization) MEDICARE’s outcomes-based contracting approach Arden Syntax an approach to specifying medical knowledge and clinical decision support rules in a form that is independent of any EHR and thus sharable across hospitals ARRA (American Recovery and Reconstruction Act) the Obama administration’s 2009 economic stimulus bill Blue Button an ASCII text based standard for heath information sharing first introduced by the Veteran’s Administration to facilitate access to records stored in VistA by their patients. The newer Blue Button + format provides both human and machine readable formats. CCD (Continuity of Care Document) an XML-based patient summary based on the CDA architecture CCOW (Clinical Context Object Workshop) an HL7 standard for synchronizing and coordinating applications to automatically follow the patient, user (and other) contexts to allow the clinical u

Files as UI

Files as UI vs API - compares attributes of iCloud vs Dropbox. It starts on an interesting note - the model of a file system in the UI is dying, and should be let go. Beyond that it looks at mappings of each system to a file system from an API point of view and compares the successes of each. I find the initial thread the most interesting. Drop the mental model of a file system - which maps virtual concepts of files and directories to a physical model of papers, folders and file cabinets - and replace it with...what? This is a paradigm shift for me. I have to admit, I loath, hate, nay, despise looking for things. If I can't find something easily, it's only about a minute before I start growling and muttering things my mother would disapprove of. On this basis, I like the idea that I can save myself from thinking about where to put things or, where I have already put them. But how do we do this? It's non-trivial, since humans think of "things" and once they

Earnest Engineer

Search This Blog