The vision of a complete, accessible and mobile permanent personal electronic medical record with built-in medical knowledge could be fulfilled by future generations of cellphones! Meanwhile, the current generation of tele-health monitors have several flaws:
· Designs assume the patient is “at home” not actively mobile.
· Interfaces are simplistic – the PC equivalent of “flash-cards” in education, thus limiting usability in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-economic environments. · The devices are special-purpose and thus relatively costly.
· The overall system functions mainly as a physiological data collector (rather than as an information visualizer)
· The devices assume a very passive role for the patient.
In contrast, a cell phone is mobile, ubiquitous, designed for 2-way communication, and easily programmed. All these problems can and will be overcome -- hopefully sooner rather than later.
No comments:
Post a Comment