Dr. Eric Topol's video on the wave of wireless medicine

Ken Gracey

One of my colleagues came across this video released last week from NBC:

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rock-center/50566442#50566442

Shows lots of synergy with the microMedic 2013 contest, and provides some good ideas for applications in the contest.

Ken Gracey

Cats92

Interesting , but i think that for medical use we need :

* specific , safe , robust and easy to use detectors
* a system to control that this detectors are giving accurate results 24h/24h
* techicians to repair or exchange quickly defective materials if needed.
* well trained users
* carefull doctors who don't beleive blindly all the results provided by this machines

borisg

Interesting but some ways off. As a physician I've been wanting the ability to do more tests on patients in my office but the problem is that once one sticks the word "medical" in front of any electronic equipment, the cost is about 20+ times more than the same device would go for if considered to be non-medical.

I'd love to have the capability to run most simple blood tests in my office, but now I'm limited to looking at blood glucose and peripheral oxygen saturation. ChemFET technology is interesting but I haven't been able to find out how long the sensors will last and what's involved in reusing them. Through photoplethysmography I can determine a patients hemoglobin concentration as well but this is all proprietary hardware which has a hefty price tag. The other thing that hasn't been considered is that an experienced physician is worth more than a huge amount of electronics as their wetware has been finely tuned to be a non-algorithmic diagnostic instrument. I went into medicine after being an electrophysiology/pharmacology researcher and fully expected that I'd be able to come up with some simple hardware/software diagnostic tools but instead I rearranged my wetware to deal efficiently with defective meatware and now just need a stethoscope and a few simple tools in order to diagnose what's wrong with a patient primarily using my clinical experience and observation.

I still like my toys which is why I've entered the Micromedic contest. My interest is in ambulatory physiologic monitoring wherein one can look at patterns of physiologic variables and use them for objective psychiatric diagnosis. This is an area of medicine where there are absolutely no quantitative measures and diagnoses are purely clinical. Also, there are a large number of diseases in which every individual system, when tested in isolation, works just fine but the person doesn't feel well. There's a lot of potential in the field of neurogastroenterology but we just don't have simple tools to quantitate bowel motility. Sleep disorders are another huge area where long-term monitoring might come up with solutions for individual patients.

The only way I can see a vast increase in remote medical monitoring technologies is if the hardware/software is open source. With closed source hardware and software the cost is simply prohibitive and one has no idea whether or not the hardware is doing what it claims to be doing. Remote monitoring of patients is going to be increasingly required given the aging of the population and the financial impossibility of having human supervision for the increasing number of demented individuals. I commend Parallax for supporting open source software as such peer reviewed software is the only way to go.

frank freedman

Problem is not so much of an open/closed source model for development as the cost of research, clinical trials and all the (which I am actually thankful for; mostly) regulatory costs and other things. Because most of these devices are not of the highest volume sales, the aforementioned costs must be amortized across the number of devices sold. Note the fall in price of the electronic BP devices, high volume, dirt cheap; more recently, pulseox for home use.

As an in-house imaging engineer, I see the same things happening with service, though that is changing as hospitals are moving more and more service back in house or to third party ISO's to cut costs. Again, economy of scale. Fewer CT systems than televisions, higher training requirements (CT training still runs 3 weeks + CBT prerequisites. Used to be 5+ at one OEM) higher cost of support for the OEMs. Cost passes to end users.

Frank

Ken Gracey

Great points, Frank, and I understand these issues better now that you've explained them.

VerikiVi

From my point of view, this is a very progressive views on modern medicine, and I agree that the prospects for the treatment of a minimum of cardiovascular disease is there.

prof_braino

The key point is the use of a smart phone or android device as a generic interface to some embedded application. This is the game changer, the paradigm shift.

Using this mnew model, the developer can concentrate on the sensor system and the app. The cost of development and certification of the interface hardware (the smart device) can be off loaded. Once the Galazy Tab is certified once, everybody can use it, just as we can have UL certicifed wall wart, and save the cost of certifiy the AC mains power supply on our device.

Of course they still have to go through required certification of the sensors and app under development, but they have to do that in any case, the overall cost will be significantly less.

This is kind of a big deal.

frank freedman

The smart phone or tablet as an interface is already here. There are multiple apps already out there including teleradiology and telemedicine apps for iPhones etc. And they have all the approvals. As an interface, provided it can appropriately display the image/data/graph/chart etc, and securely as well (at least in the states now that HITEC has come on line) it makes for simplifying that part of the development. As long as the interface is one that is intuitive to the end users. But anything in contact with the body or used for diagnostic purposes will still have the high development and regulatory costs associated with it. So, yeah, Braino has it right, The interface can be much lower cost of development, but the rest remain....... costly.