Treeduck

One quick blow on a device and cops can find out just how much alcohol you’ve consumed. Sadly though, so far they haven’t had a roadside way to test for drugs. Which means cops have to drag in people that they suspect to be using drugs. Well that will be changing at some point in the somewhat near future. Instead of dragging people down to the station for a test, Philips has a test they’ve developed to help cops out on the side of the road.
It uses nanotechnology and instead of blowing like you’d do for the alcohol test, you spit. Then after 90 seconds it gives a color coded read out. It will detect any cocaine, heroin, cannabis, amphetamines and methaphetamine. This isn’t exactly great for drug users, but for those that don’t use drugs and just seem to look the part this is definitely good news. It will end any harassment much faster through a quick test. Philips hopes to get these out to cops in Europe by the end of this year. There’s no word when it will make it to the US though.
Source: Geekologie

The Verizon Wireless network will be offering a new notebook for the masses that is much tougher than your average model, and we suspect even able to withstand environments where the normal nerd would faint by then. We’re talking about the Panasonic Toughbook H1 mobile clinical assistant (MCA) that has recently received Gobi certification for use on the Verizon Wireless network. Due to its relatively tiny form factor, extremely light chassis and a reasonable bunch of built-in specifications and features, the Toughbook H1 ends up being a rather attractive solution for those who are knee deep in mobile healthcare environments such as EMS, mobile blood banks and home health workers. Not only that, healthcare professionals who tend to do plenty of traveling between offices, patient homes and hospitals will realize just what a handy tool the Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Broadband is when used in conjunction with the Toughbook H1, allowing one to reduce down time while increasing overall productivity despite being physically removed from traditional healthcare facilities.

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (Technische Universität Wien) have developed a prototype pneumatic ventricular assist pump that is almost small enough to be delivered percutaneously via a catheter. The current model is only about 10 mm wide and 90 mm long, which means that a clinically useful device would have to be half the size. The development of the new device was commissioned by Werner Mohl, a clinical professor of cardiac surgery at TU Vienna.

“The aim was to avoid the development of heat which is caused by heart pumps that are driven by an electric motor. The heat which is produced is transferred to the blood. Professor Mohl approached us with a request to construct a pump with pneumatic air propulsion which doesn’t have to be cooled”, explains project manager and associate professor Margit Gföhler from the Institute for Engineering Design and Logistics Engineering at the TU Vienna.
Assistant professor and project colleague Helmut Mad adds: “The heart catheter pump is intended for temporary bridging after an operation or after a heart attack. It is supposed to be used for a maximum of five to ten days. The pump is powered with compressed air via a tube. Of course, the blood which is transported is hermetically separated from the compressed air. The target capacity should be five litres per minute.” With its technical benchmark data, the heart catheter pump is a very challenging activity from a construction point of view. Gföhler: “Given its size, it is difficult to obtain purchased parts and storage” Special manufacturing and production processes which can be very expensive are required."

A second prototype has now been produced from a ceramic in collaboration with the Institute of Materials Science and Technology of the TU Vienna.

Technische Universität Wien press statement: Heart pump with air propulsion

This is rather amazing: Yet another medical adherence app for the iPhone that helps users keep track of medications they are taking. The latest is called iPills–not to be confused with The Pill Phone or Pillboxer or myCommunity PillBox, all of which we have covered in the past.

Stop me when this sounds familiar: iPills lets you set up pills you need to take regularly–at any interval. With iPills your daily pillbox can show you what you need to take and what you’ve already taken. Maybe this is iPills’ value-add: Customize your pills’ appearances so it’s as easy as tapping a pill’s image to tell the app you’ve taken it.

So, what makes a pill tracking application better than the next? The ability to choose a color and shape for a given pill’s icon?

Here are the real top ten iPhone medical apps, which include one new app that was not included on other lists and also sees some rank-shifting:

1. Epocrates - This app lets users view continually updated clinical data, check for drug-drug interaction, identify pills by physical characteristics and perform medical calculations such as BMI and GRF.

2. Skyscape Medical Resources - Skyscape’s app includes resources like RxDrugs, evidence-based clinical information on conditions and symptoms, Archimedes Medical Calculator, and MedAlert drug information.

3. EyeChart - The Snellen Eye Chart is an eye chart for testing visual acuity. The app instructs users to hold the iPhone eye chart about four feet away instead of the typical 20 feet.

4. MedCalc (medical calculator) - MedCalc is a medical calculator that gives the user access to an array of medical formulas and scores.

5. Taber’s Medical Dictionary - Taber’s Medical Dictionary app includes more than 60,000 terms, 1,000 photos and 600 Patient Care Statements. The app also offers definitions and other resources, including nutrition and alternative therapy, coverage, medical abbreviations, and units of measurements.

6. Davis’s Drug Guide - Davis’s Drug Guide provides info on more than 5,000 trade name and generic drugs. This app includes info on other drug/natural/food interactions, appendices with dose calculations, customizable bookmarking and patient safety infor.

7. Eponyms (for students) - Eponyms displays a short description from more than 1,600 medical eponyms (ex. Sheehan’s syndrome, Virchow’s node).

8. ShyBladder - ShyBladder helps those who have trouble getting things started in the restroom. The app offers three different sounds of running water. (Maybe others were too afraid to include this on the list? Seriously, its number 8.)

9. STAT ICD-9 LITE - STAT ICD-9 LITE provides all 13,677 ICD-9-CD diagnosis codes to the user’s iPhone.

10. PubMed On Top Lite - PubMed On Tap Lite searches PubMed to provide and display reference information. The app includes EZproxy support, internal Web browser, option to email results in text or RIS form, advanced search options andthe ability to store and recall recent searches.

So which app is no longer officially in the top 10 because of ShyBladder? Cardio Calc. This app designed help manage patients with cardiovascular disease or hyperlipidemia by providing Framingham and Reynolds Risk scores as well as CHADS2 score.

Amy Tenderich writes one of (if not the) most influential blogs about diabetes, Diabetes Mine. Noting the news today about Apple selling its 100 millionth iPod and praising the exceptional industrial design of Apple products, she asks for Apple’s help in designing better medical devices. She points out blood glucose monitors and insulin pumps in particular (recent model insulin pump pictured above next to iPod). See her open letter to Steve Jobs here.

In the letter she notes that millions of people are tied to their medical devices, and can’t leave their home without them. Unlike the iPod, these devices help keep people with chronic conditions like diabetes alive.

There’s something else these devices do not have in common with the iPod - sensible design and attractive features. Tenderich says “most of these devices are clunky, make weird alarm sounds, are more or less hard to use, and burn quickly through batteries. In other words: their design doesn’t hold a candle to the iPod.”

She isn’t asking for Apple to actually get into the medical device business. Instead, she’s asking Steve Jobs to help jumpstart a little creativity in the space. She has three suggestions:

We have begun by brainstorming a number of actions that you and/or Apple could take to jumpstart this discussion:

* Sponsor a contest by Apple Inc. for best-designed med device from an independent party, and the winning item will receive a makeover from Jonathan Ive himself

* Conduct a “Med Model Challenge”: the Apple design team takes several existing medical devices and demonstrates how to “pimp” them to be more useful and cool

* Establish Apple Med Design School – offer a course on consumer design concepts to selected engineers from leading pharma companies

Frankly, all of these sound brilliant to me, and the press would have an absolute field day praising Apple were they to do any one of them. Apple PR, are you listening?

During Apple's iPhone 3.0 event, the presentation of a mobile-attached blood glucose monitor for diabetic users apparently bored some journalists in the room. However, the demonstration not only revealed Apple's most important leap yet in mobile devices, but also answered the pleas of a diabetic blogger.

Almost a year ago, Amy Tenderich, a San Francisco blogger who maintains Diabetes Mine for people living with diabetes, penned an open letter to Steve Jobs, asking Apple to help apply the design savvy of the iPod to the medical devices that keep millions of people alive.

Speaking specifically about the blood glucose monitors or insulin pumps used by people living with diabetes, Tenderich asked Jobs, "have you seen these things? They make a Philips GoGear Jukebox HDD1630 MP3 Player look pretty! And it’s not only that: most of these devices are clunky, make weird alarm sounds, are more or less hard to use, and burn quickly through batteries. In other words: their design doesn’t hold a candle to the iPod."

"What we need here" Tenderich wrote, "is a sweeping change in industry-wide mentality — achievable only if some respected Thought Leader tackles the medical device design topic in a public forum." She recommended that Apple start a design contest, or assign the company's design team to create some reference designs, or establish an Apple Med Design School offering courses on consumer design to engineers from pharma companies.

Tenderich's plea was picked up by blogger Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, where it certainly caught Apple's attention. Then nearly a year passed.

Rather than sponsoring a contest or coming up with its own designs, Apple did what it does best: it arranged to put its development tools in the hands of experts in the field who could solve the problem. Rather than making making medical devices look like the iPod, Apple made it easy for devices makers to work with the iPod and the iPhone.

In the past, some physicians have been resistant to computer-based medical technology because they were either unfamiliar with it, thought it was too time-consuming or felt it might chain them to a desk. But medical technology on the mobile phone has changed many physicians’ minds.

The AMA’s news site, amednews.com, reports that that 64% of doctors are using smartphones: iPhones, BlackBerrys, Treos and other hand-held devices with voice, wireless Internet access and powerful applications that turn the cell phone into a mobile computer.

An article in mobilehealthnews reports that in November of 2008 a medical student lobbied Apple to create a “medical” category for applications in the AppStore that would include applications for physicians, nurses and other healthcare workers. The medical category is now the third-fastest growing type of application for the iPhone.

According to Manhattan Research, some of the most widely used mobile applications for physician jobs are drug and clinical references, as well as clinical tools such as dosage calculators. The Diffusion Group conducted a study two years ago which concluded that mobile devices are unlikely to replace desktop systems entirely, but they can help physicians become more efficient by bringing applications to the point of care. Mobile devices also provide an opportunity for more data feedback from patients, both anecdotal and from medical monitoring devices. For example, a Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor synchs up to a diabetes management application running on the iPhone.

While support for medical accessories is nothing new, an application called AirStrip is promising much more with its AirStrip CC (Critical Care) app. A demonstration showed that the app can take live sensor data and feed it to the iPhone over the Internet in real-time, giving doctors access to data when they’re not at the hospital. The touchscreen lets physicians measure statistics, like the distance between unusual heartbeats, by tapping two points.

In more conventional applications, smart phones are used as voice, alarm, text and paging devices for medical staff.

Interestingly some healthcare reform advocates have switched their focus from pushing desktop-based medical systems and are now advocating mobile-only. Though mobile systems offer a compelling upside of speeding up research and care for medical doctor jobs, mobile devices also present an opportunity for information overload. Even the first physicians who purchased plain-old cell phones quickly realized they were never really “out of the office.” We can only imagine what it will mean when an EKG can be viewed over the phone in real time.

Ever since Apple’s AppStore created a dedicated category for medical applications for the iPhone and iTouch, it seems that — as Apple’s Mark Wilson put it today at the World Wide Developers Conference — “The medical community is flocking to the iPhone.”

To put today’s launch of the iPhone 3.0 in perspective, we’ve assembled a list of just some of the health-related milestones that the iPhone has experienced during the past eight months. While it’s not the only mobile platform out there, it’s hard to argue with the fact that the iPhone has attracted more developers and therefore more applications and services for the medical community than any other on the market today.