News
Largest mobile health study focused on acute wound care underway in Emergency Med department at GW
Dr. Neal Sikka, an Emergency Medicine physician at George Washington University, has a six month study underway examining how accurately Emergency Medicine practitioners at George Washington University Hospital can diagnose wounds from patient generated cell phone images.
Sikka told the Washington Post that it’s currently the largest mHealth (mobile health) study to look at acute wound care.
The study’s methods:
In the new study, researchers recruit people who have arrived at the hospital with cuts, skin infections, rashes and other flesh wounds. Patients use their own camera phones to document their injuries. After filling out a questionnaire about their medical history and symptoms, they send the images to a secure e-mail account. All images are downloaded and stored on a secure hard drive.
FDA is actively monitoring medical and healthcare apps in mobile app stores
Bradley Merrill Thompson, an attorney with an expertise in the FDA approval process for medical devices, is stating the Food and Drug Administration is actively monitoring app stores on various platforms.
Regulating medical devices and health care related applications falls under the FDA’s jurisdiction.
James Kendrick from JkOnTheRun spoke with Thompson, where he stated the following:
The FDA is actively engaged in surveillance of various app stores to see if apps should trigger their involvement. Applications where a smartphone is connected in any way to imaging are under scrutiny, in particular. Any app that is used to transmit images to a medical facility requires FDA approval.
Apple’s success as enterprise solution in the business world bodes well for healthcare
One of the issues we’ve discussed previously is that, when it comes to iPhone and iPad acceptance in healthcare, compatibility with the more traditional enterprise solutions could turn out to be a problem for large scale adoption of iOS 4 devices.
There was a fair amount of concern that the iPhone and iPad, as consumer electronics, would lack the necessary business-oriented features to ever be widely adopted by corporate America, let alone healthcare.
However, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests that Apple may be making major inroads when it comes to adoption as a business-wide mobile solution and this time with the blessing of corporate IT.
Notre Dame starts pilot study to research iPad’s potential in replacing traditional textbooks
Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, has started a one year pilot study of e-readers, starting with the iPad. One of the goals of the study is to determine how electronic textbooks could potentially replace traditional textbooks.
This has interesting applications for our push towards dynamic electronic medical textbooks. With the Stanford School of Medicine and UC Irvine School of Medicine recently giving iPads to their incoming medical student classes – data on the usefulness of medical ebooks should be plentiful soon.
For examples of how medical ebooks look on the iPad check out a recent review we did.
Source: SouthBendTribune
Free Kaplan medical books and Epocrates promotion about to end
Two deals set to expire:
1) Kaplan is offering it’s USMLE books (Step 1, 2, and 3), and a host of other medical texts for free in the Apple Book store until today. For details refer to our prior full story.
2) Epocrates is giving away a premium version – Epocrates Essentials – for free to medical students until tomorrow. It’s valued at $159. For details refer to our prior full story.
Make sure to get a piece of these deals before they expire and to get the word out to your peers via our Facebook and Twitter share tabs.
Also, we recently started giving away tons of promo codes for medical apps via our Facebook group, so make sure to “Like” our group so you can stay on top of the giveaways: www.facebook.com/imedicalapps
Epocrates adds multi-tasking support to iOS 4 – now significantly easier to use
Epocrates latest update for iOS 4 (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad operating systems) allows for multi-tasking support, also known as “fast app switching”. If you use Epocrates consistently, this is extremely welcome news.
The app is now significantly easier to use. When you close out of the app it saves the last screen you were on – so if you have to reference that drug you just wrote a script for, you don’t have to waste time searching for it again.
If you haven’t already, make sure to check out our full review of the different premium versions of Epocrates.
Researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are using mobile apps to help understand nicotine addiction
There are plenty of apps in the Apple Store and the Android Marketplace that try to help patients quit smoking. Some of them even have integration with social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. However, these same genre of apps are helping researchers study addition in a new way.
SmartPlanet has a great interview with Dr. David Wetter, who is leading a team of researchers using real-time smart phone data from those trying to quit smoking in order to better understand addiction.
These M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researchers are finding some interesting trends in the data they are collecting.
We use smart phones to collect data during critical events that happen when people try to quit. For example, when they have a craving to smoke or when they actually smoke a cigarette, we’ll collect data. [We'll find out]: Who else is in the environment with them? What else is going on? Are cigarettes available? Are they drinking? Are they eating? Are they at work, at home, in the car?
Using smartphones to monitor brain wave activity in real time
In the cardiac world, if you want to monitor a patient for a possible arrhythmia in an ambulatory setting, you can consider strapping them with a Holter monitor or other types of more long term cardiac event monitors.
For neurologists, options are limited – but a new group might change this.
Wave Technology Group is working with the University of Chicago Hospital’s Pediatric Epilepsy Center to develop a mobile EEG monitor connected via bluetooth to a patient’s smart phone that can deliver real time brainwave data.
They are calling it the Wave EEG Monitor and expect it to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2011.
Currently, the project is focused on patients with Epilepsy. The team hopes the EEG monitor could be used to warn those with Epilepsy in real time when a seizure could be imminent – making sure they aren’t doing something that could put them at risk if they were to have a sudden seizure. For children with epilepsy the early warning would be of obvious benefit to parents or other caretakers.
The project also has huge implications for research. The large amounts of data collected could be used by researchers to look for trends or this monitoring system could even be used in clinical trials to study the efficacy of anticonvulsants for epileptic treatment.
Continue on for a description of how the device works:
Kaplan offering 100 free e-books through Apple Bookstore for limited time
Kaplan is offering 100 free e-books through iBooks, Apple’s e-reader for the iPad and the iPhone.
For those in the medical field, there are plenty of books to choose from. The e-books range from Kaplan USMLE step 1, 2, and 3, to novels about Intern life.
These books from Kaplan are usually $29.99 in other e-book formats. The deal is only valid in the Apple Bookstore, and lasts until August 30th.
Other categories of free e-books Kaplan is offering for a limited time include College (SAT prep), Graduate (GRE, MBA, MCAT), Law (PMBR), Nursing (CCRN), and Education (GRE, GMAT).
Although these e-books can be accessed on your iPhone, they are significantly easier to read on the iPad. Continue on to see how Kaplan’s USMLE step 3 Qbook looks on the iPad, including the annotating and highlighting functions.
