iPhone in medicine
The iPhone's impact on healthcare's pretty widely-known. There's already over 12,000 health-related apps for Apple devices (Mobile Health News). And hospitals across the planet are installing intelligent patient monitoring systems, including 159 of 164 Houston Healthcare hospitals. Such systems offer real-time machine test read-outs to monitoring stations, allow patient access to multimedia, entertainment and up-to-the minute patient records.
It goes much further: In the UK, City University and The Stroke Association are testing iPad/Wii apps to allow stroke victims suffering aphasia (which affects 250,000 in the UK) to communicate with gestures.
There's a few other interesting nuggets I've come across while researching this little slice of "we're already in the Jetsons" prose:
-- 98 percent of US physicians already use mobile solutions (Spyglass).
-- 79 percent of doctors prefer the iPad (Aptilon).
The end result?
The installed base of M2M-connected healthcare devices will exceed 774 million by 2020. (Machina Research). And there's a pretty good chance, given the medical industry preference for the secure walled garden offered by Apple products, that iPhones (and iPads, obviously) will be part of this mix. One system I read about consists of a watch, worn by the patient, that on the press of a single help button will send emails, voice calls and SMS messages to an entire medical team, escalating the contacts reached to scale with the severity of the emergency. These solutions can boost response times to patient emergency and save lives.
