What's up Doc?

I continue with my search for the newest and most useful use ways to use mobile technology. This week I found two articles that focus on medical advances with mobile devices. The first article addresses how the cameras in smart phones can use your fingers to monitor heart rates and other vital signs. Here's an excerpt:

" Android app that measures not only heart rate, but also heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation - all through a finger against the lens. Measurements made by the app are said to be as accurate as those obtained using standard medical monitors."

Are we going to become our own doctors? Much more remains to be researched but this shows a great potential for doctors to monitor and check up on their patients , whenever, wherever they are. I can imagine the app alerting your doctor about any high risk event that shows up on your ECG.

In another related application for the mobile platform I found research being conducted by MITRE to use the camera lens to detect early stages of various diseases by scanning the eye. An app called EyesFirst is in development. Details about the project can be found here:



Here's a quick read about the article:

"In a project called EyesFirst, MITRE's Center for Transforming Health is developing automated methods to detect the early stages of multiple diseases from information contained in 3-D retinal images. When the methods are fully developed, clinicians around the world will be able to use capabilities developed by the EyesFirst project to non-invasively detect conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.

"There's growing evidence that changes in the retina correlate with the onset and progression of certain diseases," says Salim Semy, a lead software systems engineer at MITRE and principal investigator on the project. "The biggest problem with treating these diseases is detecting them early enough. For example, more than 25 percent of diabetic adults are undiagnosed primarily because they haven't been screened for it. This often leads to irreversible vision loss that could have been prevented."

Both of these articles point out the use of mobile apps to advance the capbilities of smartphones. Indeed, we can all benefit from such advances. As the saying goes.... An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.