Monitoring Patients in the "Cloud" Is for the Birds

... because when a "cloud-based" system like Amazon's goes down, patients lives are at risk and your company is at the mercy of ...

... gee, I'm not sure.

-Wes

Update: The thread linked could be a hoax (see last comment) but Amazon's "cloud" outage was not.

A Free iPhone 4 Heart Rate Monitor

Hey, it's fun AND free!

Use your iPhone 4's camera to measure your heart rate. The application detects how the color of your finger changes when blood flows into it, much like the way a pulse oximeter works.

-Wes

Addendum 29 Nov 2010 06:50 am CST: Seems there's an app for Android phones too.

Bad Looks, Good Concept: A Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor for the iPhone

Someone has to talk to this company about ergonomic engineering:

What looks like a bulky female hygiene product is actually a health monitor that hooks up to an iPhone via Bluetooth, sending bodily information such as heart rates to the compatible app.

It's not on sale yet, with Proteus' Raisin sensor only just being passed through the FDA, but it's another step for the iPhone into the operating room, after Apple showed off the Lifescan app by Johnson & Johnson at last year's WWDC, which works alongside a wireless glucose meter. Diabetes can analyze the glucose levels in their blood, with the information being sent to the iPhone app over Bluetooth.

To their engineers: Any color but white or light blue, okay?

-Wes

Twittering Your Heart Rate

Developed by Japanese geek forum Koress Project, the Akiduki Pulse box does this by autonomously posting your heartbeat to Twitter. Once there, friends, family and enemies can all watch as your natural rhythms play out on the world stage in real time.

Although it might sound like a good idea at first, your relatives might become a bit upset when Twitter crashes.

-Wes

Cell Phones for Cardiac Telemetry

From their press release, AT&T could give a whole new meaning to "dead zones:"

"Mednet, a leading provider of cardiac monitoring products and surveillance services, is helping doctors and patients remotely monitor heart arrhythmia through personal mobile devices. Under a new contract with AT&T, Mednet's HEARTRAK External Cardiac Ambulatory Telemetry (ECAT) solution will facilitate wireless monitoring of patient devices via Bluetooth-enabled cell phones across AT&T's expansive 3G and EDGE wireless data footprint, which covers more than 13,000 cities and towns and 40,000 miles of highway across the country.

Until now, patients using Mednet heart monitors utilized a toll-free number and had to place their monitoring device near a landline phone receiver to send a signal to a central monitoring center."

Heh.

-Wes