How technological products are transforming personal healthcare
The emergence of tech-based products combined with mobile communication technologies have led to some great innovations in the healthcare arena.
One is something you’ve probably seen from Bayer's repeated television commercials, the USB Contour, which allows Nick in the video below to gain a deeper understanding of his blood glucose levels.
MedicAlert
The Canadian Press’ Stephanie Levitz reported last week that MedicAlert, known for its iconic modified caduceus emblem to mark people who have complicated medical conditions through wearable objects to communicate with paramedics in case of emergency is going high-tech after 50 years.
MedicAlert may be expanding into the digital realm, but they aren’t changing the bracelets, they are changing how the information the bracelets link to can be used.
A computerized file is now created that contains all the data that potential patients would like medical professionals to know in case of emergency, going farther than what MedicAlert bracelet wearers can inscribe.
In Nova Scotia, a pilot project is underway that allows paramedics wireless access to the files through a tablet in the ambulance.
CEO Robert Ridge says: “Technology is allowing us to deliver information in different way”.
Dog-tags fitted with USB keys are also available to hold data for use with smartphone apps.
Speed of information is critical in an emergency situation, and because MedicAlert is a private membership-based system that is already digitalized, it is much easier to roll out, versus provinces that have struggled to put into place such a system over the years.
This all goes to show how the smartphone and tablet revolution is changing one of the oldest staples in healthcare as well.
External Storage vs. Cloud Computing
Google believes that cloud computing could entirely replace internal hard drives and external storage devices such as USBs. That was clearly evident when Google launched a product without an operating system in late 2010 that only used the Google Internet Browser Chrome that just hit 20% market share recently.
However, USB drives, perhaps believed to be next in line to go obsolete due to the emergence of the cloud seem to be taking on a different purpose in the age of smartphones and tablets, something the tape, the floppy disk, and the compact disc all failed to achieve in any remarkable way.
That’s not to say you couldn’t do the same with those older technologies and older healthcare infrastructure systems, in the spirit of cost savings by adding any number of product to product communication technologies.
After all, Google’s massive infrastructure was initially built on the cheapest used computers and servers they could find- for products that are obsolete can come back into a new form, which is actually a McLuhan law of media.
