Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

November 10, 2009

Mobile phone as a medical lab

Filed under: Mobile, Technology, Trends — Tags: — Raja @ 9:17 am

One of the most promising application in mobile healthcare is remote diagnostics using the mobile phone. This can impact billions of people that do not have proper access to healthcare around the world. Here is a glimpse of such a future.

Your mobile phone may soon be able to diagnose respiratory illnesses in seconds when you cough into it

Apple iPhone. Cough into your mobile phone for instant diagnosis
But will it ask you to turn your head to one side as well?

Software being developed by American and Australian scientists will hopefully allow patients simply to cough into their phone, and it will tell them whether they have cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases.

Whether a cough is dry or wet, or “productive” or “non-productive” (referring to the presence of mucus on the lungs), can give a doctor information about what is causing that cough, for example whether it is caused by a bacterial or a viral infection.

Health workers can distinguish the different kinds of cough by sound. Now, it is claimed, the new software will do the same, and will save patients a trip to the surgery – or tell them when they are at risk of serious illness.

Suzanne Smith of STAR Analytical Services, the firm behind the research, says: “Why haven’t we been measuring coughs?

“It’s the most common symptom when a patient presents, and we are relying on doctors and nurses with good old technology from the 19th century.”

Coughs typically last around one-quarter of a second, comprising a sharp intake of breath, a silent exhalation and then the complex burst of sounds that makes the cough noise.

Healthy, voluntary coughs tend to be slightly louder than the involuntary coughs of an ill person. And after the initial explosive sound, there are subtleties like vibrating vocal cords and mucus that reveal information about what is happening in the patient’s respiratory system.

The software would compare the patient’s cough to a pre-recorded database of coughs, containing the sounds of all respiratory diseases from people of both sexes and various ages, weights and other variables.

Currently the STAR team has a database of several dozen patients, but they estimate they will need a total of around 1,000 before the software will be reliable.

The software is currently run on a computer, but it is anticipated that it could be rewritten as a smartphone application.

September 4, 2009

Mobile healthcare in Africa

Filed under: Mobile, Technology — Tags: — Raja @ 10:31 am

Venture beat profiles a small outfit started by stanford med students that has developed a sms based solution for healthcare in developing countries.

malawiLucky Gunasekara calls himself a “guerrilla” health care worker.

Instead of burying his head in the books, the 25-year-old Stanford medical student is jaunting off to East Africa and training village health workers how to use an open-source SMS platform to keep track of patients. He and partner Josh Nesbit are developing Frontline SMS:Medic, which uses one-to-one and group text messaging to deliver health care in disparate and remote parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.

“We started asking what can we do as an independent, grassroots, free and open-source tech movement to create change?” he said in an interview at the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco. “There are definitely mobile health solutions out there, but they’re expensive.”

Nesbit, whose mother fell in love with in Malawi several years ago and introduced him to the culture, began a pilot last summer using donated mobile phones, a computer and a modem. Some of the workers had never used a mobile phone before, so Nesbit had to teach them how to text.

Basically, doctors in central hospitals in Malawi needed a way to communicate with health workers in remote villages. Before, if a patient dropped off the radar or wasn’t following through with care, the main way a doctor would know if something went wrong is if they sent someone out there physically by motorbike. That was inefficient in Nesbit’s eyes, especially because the country is suffering from a doctor shortage.

“Hospitals were spending tons of money sending nurses around to check on patients randomly,” he said.

With the cell phones and the SMS system, Nesbit could deliver a single cell phone to every village under a hospital’s watch. If somebody was injured by an accident or suffered a burn, they could call on the village health worker to text the hospital back for treatment instructions. 

This is a nice example of how mobile technologies can be used for provding healthcare to remort parts of the developing coutnries. Mobile technologies will have a huge impact in healthcare everywhere (both developed and developing countries). My startup MDava is working on mobile healthcare solutions for the India market.

Powered by WordPress