Blog | News & Information on Wireless Services & Telecommunications
Posted: 02/23/10 by Mobile Future Team
“Along with the State Department, the Pentagon and aid groups, as well as Haiti’s leading cellphone carrier and countless volunteers, the Coast Guard is part of an emergency contact network for Haitians to send text messages requesting aid.”
Amid all the destruction, according to this New York Times report, mobile phones are helping aid workers’ rescue efforts in Haiti. The decision to focus on text messaging resulted from the damage Haiti’s telecommunications system suffered from the earthquake. Broken transmitters and overloaded networks made telephone calls nearly impossible. However, text messaging was still available.
Among the successes according to a Coast Guard volunteer cited by The Times, text messaging helped identify a tent city that the American military and relief workers were previously unaware of.
Posted: 02/09/10 by Mobile Future Team
Last week, the White House unveiled a great step forward in the fight to reduce birth defects. It's a public-private effort called the Text4baby campaign and according to the Associated Press, it is the U.S.'s first free, pre-natal education program to use mobile phone text messages.
Expecting parents should text "BABY" (or "BEBE", for Spanish texts) to 511411. They'll receive weekly texts geared to the baby's birth date that cover nutrition, immunization and birth defect prevention. The texts, which have been vetted by government and nonprofit health experts, continue through the baby's first birthday.
An added benefit: Several major wireless carriers have waived text fees for the service.
For more information, click here
Posted: 01/20/10 by Mobile Future Team
Out of the devastation in Haiti have come extraordinary stories of survival. One amazing first-person account is of Dan Woolley, a Denver-native, who found himself trapped beneath the rubble of his hotel in Port-au-Prince. The tool that saved his life? His iPhone. Through his wireless connection he was able assess his injuries and diagnosis a broken leg.
Woolley used the light from his iPhone to show him his injuries and diagnosed it properly as a broken foot. Then, he used the instructions from the app to treat the excessive bleeding from cuts on his legs and the back of his head.
Furthermore, he was able to figure out his location within the building using GPS and find an elevator shaft—which lead him to safety. A true testament of personal ingenuity in the face of catastrophe.
Posted: 12/14/09 by Mobile Future Team
With the exception of
reducing the Digital Divide, probably the greatest social benefit from wireless
technology is its potential to improve access to more affordable
healthcare. We've blogged a lot about
this (see here, here and here) and now
thanks to Venuri Siriwardane at the Newark Star-Ledger, there's
even more evidence.
As
an example, Siriwardane cites fuzzy bedroom slippers with pressure sensors in
the soles which wirelessly transmit movement data, including information that
the wearer may be more likely to fall.
Of
greater potential benefit, researchers are pouring research funding into the
development of cost-effective wireless audio and video consultation services so
doctors may interact remotely with patients in real time.
The
reason for this is not hard to discern:
Remote
patient monitoring alone can generate between 20 percent to 40 percent in
savings, said Chris Wasden, managing director of health industries strategy and
innovation at PricewaterhouseCoopers....
Wasden [explained] that telehealth is much more common in developing
countries such as India, where cell phones enable people to receive health care
in remote areas that once lacked access to modern medicine. "They've already
developed the ability to deliver mobile health care to their people, but we're
behind the times on that."
Better
healthcare. More affordable access. That's the mobile future.
Posted: 12/04/09 by Mobile Future Team
As Washington focuses on
healthcare legislation, here's a sobering statement from Dr. Pauline Chen,
author of the New York Times' "Doctor & Patient" column:
"Nonadherence,
or the failure to follow medical advice, is the most important cause of
organ rejection in long-term transplant
survivors."
Teenagers are at
especially high risk, she writes this week, citing studies suggesting that a
majority of teen liver transplants fail and that teen patients are four times
more likely than adults to take their medications at the wrong time or to forget
to take them.
So how to reach
today's hard-to-reach teens? Last month, researchers at researchers at
Mount Sinai Hospital in New York published a study showing the remarkable
effectiveness of texting in improving success rates among young liver transplant
patients.
During a
year-long test, patients receiving texts were more likely to take their
medications. One result: while 12 of the young people experienced rejection
episodes in the previous year, only two did so during the
study.
The next time a text message appears on your phone, it may be your doc giving you an important
reminder.
Posted: 11/17/09 by Mobile Future Team
The
New York Times reported this
month on an engineer who is converting cell phones into devices that diagnose
diseases. Dr. Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at
UCLA, has successfully adapted cell phones for screening in places far from
hospitals, technicians or diagnostic laboratories. Dr. Ozcan's devices provide a
simple solution to a complex problem by replacing the need for a traditional
microscope with a basic cell phone camera.
One prototype, a slide holding a finger
prick of blood can be inserted over the phone's camera sensor. The sensor
detects the slide's contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital
or regional health center. The phones can detect the asymmetric shape of
diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood
cells, a sign of infection.
Dr. Ozcan has formed a company, Microskia,
to commercialize the technology. Some of the company's products would be
adaptations of regular cell phones. For phones without cameras, or phones too
compact to modify, the company has different designs, including a simple box
with a sensing chip that can be plugged into a cell phone or laptop with a USB
cord.
As explained in The New York Times article, the devices
are compact in part because they have eliminated the central element in a
microscope, its lenses. There is no need for lenses in these devices because
magnification can be done electronically. For this electronic system of
magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cell phone
shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone's camera chip. Some of
the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells
and interfering with the other light waves. When the waves interfere, they
create a pattern called a hologram. The detector in the camera records that
hologram or interference pattern as a series of
pixels.
"The holograms are rich in information,"
Dr. Ozcan said. "We can learn a lot in seconds," he said. "We can process the
information mathematically and reconstruct images like those you would see with
a microscope."
Posted: 11/13/09 by Mobile Future Team
Do you hate the cold stethoscope pressed against your back as your doctor asks for a good deep cough? Well, those days may soon be over thanks to our phones.
A recent article on Discovery News offers exciting insight into new applications for our phones, which can analyze the sound of coughs and allow doctors to make initial diagnoses.
New research by American and Australian scientists aims to diagnose cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases by analyzing coughs with software. The research could save patients across the world a trip to the doctor's office. Instead, they could simply cough into their cell phone and receive a diagnosis a few seconds later.
The implications for such research might not only save us a trip to the doctor's office, but could also help reduce the spread of contagious diseases and help employers keep sick workers at home, as a recent post on Internet Evolution points out.
If the software commercially existed now, it could go far in preventing the spread of H1N1 flu, as infected people would no longer congregate in doctors' offices, nor could they stay at work while sick. An employer could simply require any staff member to cough into her phone to check to see if the illness is contagious. Or an employer could require employees to cough into their phones before reporting in to work.
There are still a number of issues to be worked out: how to sterilize our phones after coughing into them, or how doctors will account for the factors like age, sex and weight that influence coughs. Still, the possibility of bringing the point of diagnosis from the doctor's office to any place we can take our phones must not be overlooked.
Our nation has been consumed over the last few months with the need to improve healthcare while reducing healthcare costs. Here's a chance for our phones to help do both.
Posted: 11/02/09 by Allison Remsen
"We're in the adolescence of the mobile and wireless revolution," said White House policy expert Tom Kalil, as he began his discussion of wireless issues and federal policy at today's Mobile Future luncheon in Washington.
Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science and Technology, said the Obama Administration understood and respected the immense economic and social benefits of a burgeoning wireless industry. "We want to create the right policy environment for private sector investment," he said, adding that "[Wireless] innovation is a powerful tool to address the broad range of challenges we face."
As an example, he cited mobile healthcare - "a really promising area." He also cited the power of wireless in connection with other advances such as nanotechnology, which will soon put the entire contents of the Library of Congress on a device the size of a sugar cube.
At a subsequent panel discussion, Debbie Goldman, an economist with the Communications Workers of America, discussed the linkage between wireless investment and union jobs. "There are 45,000 union workers in the wireless industry," she said. "Telecom networks are good employment opportunities that offer good career jobs for [union workers]."
Also on the panel was Citi Investment Research analyst Michael Rollins, who discussed the relationship between industry investment and government regulation. "In the telecom industry, you deal with long-life assets," he said. That makes changes in regulation a cause for great concern.
Also presenting at the luncheon were economists Robert Hahn and Hal Singer, who discussed the economic implications of exclusive mobile handset contracts between manufacturers and wireless carriers. To access their paper, please click here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1477042
Posted: 11/02/09 by Mobile Future Team
Mobile Future staff, as well as several attendees, are live-tweeting today's Mobile Future event at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Click here to see their tweets in real-time.
The event, "President Obama's Innovation Agenda: Spurring Investment and Innovation in the Wireless Sector," features Tom Kalil of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, Bob Hahn, Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Center and Visiting Senior Fellow at Oxford's Smith School, and Hal Singer, President and Managing Director of Empiris.
The forum will conclude with a panel discussion moderated by Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter and featuring Tom Kalil, Debbie Goldman of the Communications Workers of America, and Mike Rollins of Citi Investment Research.
Posted: 10/14/09 by Mobile Future Team
The Broadband Breakfast Club hosted an important dialogue yesterday focused on the future of telemedicine. Billed as “Setting the Table for the National Broadband Plan: Health Care,” the panel discussion included four physicians, who – along with Drew Clark, Editor and Executive Director of
BroadbandCensus.com – examined how the development of a national broadband plan will affect health care delivery and outcomes.
The panelists included:
-Dr. Adam Darkins, Department of Veterans' Affairs
-Col. Ron Poropatich, M.D., Department of the Army
-Dr. Jay Sanders, Global Telemedicine Group; the "father of telemedicine"
-Dr. Ted Eytan, Medical Director for Delivery Systems Operations Improvement, Kaiser Permanente
Dr. Sanders was quick to point out that telehealth is an “old idea,” something he’s been working on for nearly 40 year. Though widespread adoption of telemedicince still hasn’t been realized, Dr. Sanders is optimistic about its future and sees broadband as the “umbilical cord” of telehealth. He also predicted that the smartphone will be the key for both health monitoring and the delivery of medical information such as test results and prescriptions.
Dr. Darkins brought up another “old idea” -- hospitals, which he described as an “outdated, Victorian models for health care.” Dr. Darkins argued that the delivery of medical services is moving away from the hospital model toward home-, school-, and work-based care that’s focused on prevention.
Dr. Eytan cited studies showing that telehealth application successfully lowers costs and improves health outcomes. The full panel agreed that health care delivery is shifting from a model based on one doctor’s opinion toward a more advanced “team approach” in which several health care professionals work together in diagnosing and treating a patient.
When an audience member asked about the obstacles preventing widespread adoption of telemedicine, Dr. Sanders responded that outdated regulations, such as state licensing requirements, and CMS reimbursement rules are standing in the way.
The application examples and costs savings potential were so compelling that several audience members asked variations of the question: Why isn’t everyone using telemedicine?
As the health care reform debate moves forward in Congress, we should all be asking this.
Webcasts of the Broadband Breakfast Club are available on the BroadbandCensus.com channel on TV Mainstream <http://www.tvmainstream.com/series/bbclub/.
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Tags: Mobile Health, Public Safety, Text message