Fascinating Medical Advances using your cell phone!

[Uncle Al]

This is a must watch of "things" to come

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/50582822#50582822

Uncle Al

[Caultron]

This is a must watch of "things" to come

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/50582822#50582822

This has been old technology since 1966. It's called a tricorder.

Of course back then it was high-tech military equipment from the 23rd century.

Hmm...

Seriously, this is exciting stuff. The problem is that cutting costs on office calls, medical tests, medications, and procedures by definition cuts someone else's revenues, and they're likely to fight back. Can't you just hear it? Not as accurate, less reliable, widespread liability... But hopefully, logic and common sense will prevail.

[Sinned]

The recording aspect is amazing - from heart monitoring through blood pressure and, for me as a diabetic, glucose measurement. All well and good but just as automated tools has destroyed a lot of the real creativity in computing the next step in this medical monitoring is to hook up the output to another computer and thus produce an automated medical diagnosis. Good or bad? I don't know. It might eliminate a lot of mistakes made by medical personnel but would people necessarily trust the diagnosis when their lives are potentially on the line? Who has responsibility if there's a misdiagnosis? Will it be taken as read that the results are correct and not question them? Look at how people make stupid decisions with sat nav systems and blindly obey the device and turn onto a train line or into a river? To apply this to an automated medical diagnosis would be frightening. I think a bit of common sense is needed here.

[Caultron]

For sure, technology like this will sometimes be appropriate and sometimes not.

Continuous monitoring, with computers watching for dangerous patterns, is certainly attractive in some cases. I mean, we can't all have doctors or medical technicians following us 24 hours a day. But as you point out, there are dangers of over-reliance as well.

But I can tell you this: From time to time I need to wear a heart-monitoring device, and when I do, it's a couple of stick-on electrodes, a control-and-recording device about the size of a cell phone, and then a real cell-phone to provide a data connection to the monitoring service. So that's three cell-phone-sized gadgets (counting my own cell phone) that I have to carry. And I constantly wonder why all that stuff can't all be combined into a single app that runs on my own phone.

It's also annoying that with the dedicated monitoring device, I can't see my own results. I understand that some patients may misinterpret their own readings and take detrimental actions, but they're still my results.

But I guess halting steps are the usual pace of progress.