Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is creativity that brought information technology into medicine.
While some advances such as telemedicine, and electronic medical records are now used widely, it is still the gadget-friendly specialists who have slowly brought these devices by the hand into medicine, realising the enormous advantage they have for the patient.
Some weeks ago, surgeons in Chennai and Mumbai used what you and I use to listen to music, and maybe browse the web, to conduct high-precision hip and knee replacements. In Chennai, Vijay C. Bose, an orthopaedic surgeon, who did the hip and knee replacements using the iPod Touch, explained that a specialised software developed by the company that provides the prosthesis had enabled the iPod to perform like a computer navigating for the surgeon. Once the co-ordinates are fed into the software, it zeroes in on a three dimensional location of the joint to be replaced, and indicates the point of fitting in the prosthesis.
The iPod Touch also speaks to other Apple communication devices within a particular range, and the entire surgery can be transmitted to be reviewed later by the surgeon even in the comfort of his home. “It is about 99 per cent accurate, and is an advance over the computer, which of course cannot fit in the palm of your hand,” he said.
V-scan too can fit in the palm and enables physicians to provide more rapid diagnoses. GE Healthcare's new pocket-sized visualisation tool has been developed to provide physicians with imaging capabilities at the point of care.
Roughly the size of a smart phone, V-scan houses powerful, ultra-smart, ultra-sound technology that provides clinicians with an immediate, non-invasive method to help secure visual information about what is happening inside the body. The battery-operated device can easily be taken from room to room for being used in many clinical, hospital or primary-care settings.
“V-scan is a breakthrough innovation from GE Healthcare, and has the potential to redefine frontline healthcare practice and patient management with its ability to give non-invasive, visual information of the inside body in real time. V-scan is designed to be complementary to the stethoscope — to help physicians go beyond what they can hear to what they can see,” explains V. Raja, president & CEO, GE Healthcare South Asia.
“To make a rapid diagnosis, especially critical, in life-threatening situations, we need to take a look inside the body. A tool like this can help to facilitate detection of diseases at an earlier stage and help people lead a healthy life,” says Apollo Hospitals chairman P.C. Reddy.
V-scan is capable of scanning up to 30 patients with its one-hour battery power backup. The data can be stored on board with the 4GB memory card, expandable to 32 GB. The clinician can store images and add voice annotations, and the docking station plus cable link helps in the transfer of data to a PC.
It is not just the top corporations that are looking at mobile systems to help healthcare. R. Vignesh, a 10th standard student of Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan Vidyalaya, Chennai, says he has devised a system whereby alerts will be automatically sent to the nearest hospital when a patient has a heart attack.
He proposes to do so by getting high-risk patients to wear a specially designed vest that will integrate sensors such as an ECG, respirometer, accelerometer, carbon monoxide detector, blood pressure sensor, and temperature monitor. The data from the sensors are sent to a proxy GSM SIM card attached to the circuit board in the shirt and are forwarded to the hospital.
“It also checks the severity of the attack, and if it finds the patient conscious, it gives first aid instructions and crucial information like the Dos and Don'ts under that conditions to the user through a small speaker on the shirt,” explains Vignesh, who received an award for his innovation from the former President, Abdul Kalam, at a function at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
