Qualcomm’s Tricorder X-Prize: Mobile Redefining Medicine

While this is happening my doctor is struggling to use the laptop that her medical group gave her and is having me re-enter the same medical record information every time that I come in. In my experience there are a few doctors that are pushing these kinds of advancements and the majority that are just trying to cope. This is not unusual in any user population, but mainstream doctors seem to be particularly resistant to adoption of advanced technology. Is Qualcomm getting much response from the medical community on this?

Qualcomm is working with the bleeding edge developers to invente the future of medicine along with the infrastructure to support mobile services. Automating medical records is being performed by other companies like IBM.

Is the goal of these devices to put better tools in the hands of the doctors or will we be bypassing the doctors to give diagnostic capabilities directly to patients with them? If they are going to augment the doctors then they need to fit into the infrastructure. I worked with a few hospitals a while back who were struggling to coordinate multiple diagnostic systems that each used wifi. Each of them worked fine on its own, but they did not fit well into the hospital network infrastructure. My point is that automated medical records is the state of the art that many MD's are struggling with right now and these devices are the leading edge of what we are creating. At some point we need to bridge that gap.

There's such an amazing flow of gadgets coming out these days like the Zio XT patch and the Scanadu--right in my backyard at Ames.

The more of this sort of innovation the better. Not for doctors, but for individuals.

Just today I read in the paper that tere's a new recommendation coming out that will double the number of people who will be coerced into taking cholesterol drugs like lipitor, to a whopping 1/3 of the population. That's freakin' insane. They keep lowering the threshold of high-drama antics, to scare their patients into becoming the infinite revenue stream for drug companies.

So, this sort of innovation should put individuals more in charge of themselves. I'm all for it.

absolutely. There's a huge gap between what the medical industry is using and what is pheasible in terms of technology. Most that I've met with are having trouble with basic computer knowledge and are frankly scared of anything too new.

If only we could persuade the health care industry to keep the data that they gather at such great expense and personal inconvenience. After coughing up an extra 50% for my eye exams to obtain retinal images to track any progressive damage through time, I was shocked when I contacted my eye doctor for an appointment after 5 years without any problems and was told that my medical records had been shredded because they were old. In my humble opinion, as long as we are alive our medical records should be kept intact. After we're gone, disposition of the records can be discussed (medical insights for our descendents) and debated (privacy and cost).

How about BP measurement via a plaster sensor ? Not much point checking the heart rate without BP value really.

Maxim Integrated has collaborated on a similar wearable sensor.

http://www.clearbridgevitalsigns.com/

I can see a lot of potential for realtime health monitoring.

BP is a good one. You can get a number of measurements form a pulse oximeter, including heart rate and even detect abnormal heart beats

@Bert22306 this sort of innovation should put individuals more in charge of themselves

You are right--the more we understand our own health condition, the more we can take charge of our own therapies, hopefully preventing problems before they become critical, rather than just jump on the bandwagon of the latest trend to deal with health problems after they pass the critical threshold.

There are tons of cool devices in the works now. The bottleneck is the docs don't know what to do with all the data. New devices, old procedures.

Of course, this is the wave of the future in medicine. We already use mobile platforms for much of personal lives. One problem is that as we get more dependent on such devices for medical monitoring, this mobile platform will have to become much more robust.

The other side that is not often brought in such discussions is that our personal lifestyle, much of which is, or certainly can be, connected with our mobile platform, has an effect on our health. These should be integrated with the explicit health monitoring.

On such example is diabetes. It is very much connected to what, how much, and when, we eat. At the moment there's mobile apps such as 'Calorie Counter' where food intake can be logged and totaled. Restaurants often have online menus. All this can be integrated, such that what you order, portion size, etc, with medication dose and timing, along with real time glucose monitoring.

Life style, medical monitoring and record keeping should be integrated. Intelligent software monitoring can both alert the user, as well as medical staff, routine as well as urgent, situations.

I agree blood pressure is very important. Not sure if there's any technology that would fit what we're talking about here. Also, electrolyte monitoring would be very useful.