Besides cost, poor design is the biggest barrier to adoption for both HIT and medical devices. When I saw the photo of Asus' thumb keyboard designed for their new ultra mobile PC (UMPC) I was reminded of Graffiti, the handwriting recognition user interface Palm developed for their PDAs. Graffiti was one those things that sort […]
A European embedded computing
company has announced a wrist-worn wearable computer that runs
embedded Linux or Windows CE (press release). Eurotech's WWPC (”wrist-worn PC”) provides typical PDA type capabilities, along with several wearable-specific features. Target markets include emergency
rescue, security, healthcare, maintenance, logistics, and “many other”
applications.
One of the cool features is what they call their tilt and dead […]
In response to a 30% increase in emergency room volume since 1999 (up to 36,000 visits), Baylor is spending $9.2 million to expand the ED. Space the emergency department will go from 11,300 to 23,300 square feet, including adding 7 patient rooms and a CT scanner to the department. Their own CT, whoa.
In what is surely good news for remote monitoring vendors, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA - wait, doesn't that stand for transische…) reported 42.1 million Americans now have broadband Internet access.
Of course, let’s just footnote that by noting that US broadband means
higher than 200 Kpbs in at least one direction, so that 256 Kbps
down/128 […]
Last Thursday saw the IEEE approve draft 1.0 of 802.11n. Competing groups of vendors have been struggling over the direction of 802.11n for some time, but a group of chip makers, including Atheros, Broadcom, Intel, and Marvell pushed through a near unanimous voted for the draft.
[…] the proposal will now be sent out for balloting […]
Vendors with new products that want to display the Wi-Fi certification seal, will now have to incorporate WPA2, the version of Wi-Fi Protected Access that includes the full IEEE 802.11i security spec, such as AES-CCMP encryption keys. New product support of WPA2 will force some existing product upgrades to remain competitive.
This new standard is the […]
After an IEEE meeting of the 802.11s mesh networking task group, there could be a unified standard that mesh devices could conform to for interoperability within a year.
Two leading groups with separate proposals, instead of slugging it out
for a year or two, asked for and were given permission to attempt to
merge into a joint proposal […]
The dust-up over recent medical device recalls continues, in the St Paul Pioneer Press:
In an effort to get medical-device manufacturers to pay “for their
mistakes,” a a lawmaker introduced a bill at the Capitol on Monday that
would require the companies to cover medical costs when their devices
are replaced because of a recall.
While med-tech companies provide a […]
Here's a typical scenario: a researcher writes a grant application to do a study; if the grand is awarded, the grant pays the researcher to do the study; once the study is complete the researcher writes a paper which gets published in a peer reviewed journal. Frequently it is the US government who provides the […]
Forbes zeros in on one of health care's conuundrums, recalling potentially unsafe medical devices. While Forbes says, “Recalls aren't what they used to be,” they offer no proof of backsliding or laxness on the part of the FDA or medical device manufacturers.
Last year Baxter International recalled 256,000 of its Colleague
drug-infusion pumps, four times in […]
