A Roadmap to Smarter Health Care

Devices that can take a person's blood pressure, temperature, or respiration rate and transmit them immediately and automatically to doctors or family could soon be available as consumer products for the home and in medical offices.

New technology announced recently by the University of Florida (UF; Gainesville, USA) and IBM (Armonk, NY, USA) provides technologic stepstones to make it easier for any company to manufacture and sell smart networked devices--while also making them friendlier for consumers. The investigators designed middleware--software and hardware that glues together different systems--that can give similar health-aid devices independence and connectivity. The software is based on open standards, which make it easy for product developers to tap the technology in any new smart assistive devices. The hardware component of the system is an inexpensive sensor platform about half the size of a business card, which makes it easy to create a network of sensors and make their information available on a computer network.

"We call it quality-of-life engineering,” said project leader Sumi Helal, Ph.D., a professor of computer engineering at UF. "It's really a change of mindset.”

"UF and IBM both see the need and the opportunity to integrate the physical world of sensors and other devices directly into enterprise systems,” said Richard Bakalar, chief medical officer for IBM. "Doing so in an open environment will remove market inhibitors that impede innovation in critical industries like healthcare and open a broader device market that's fueled by uninterrupted networking.”

The UF-IBM technology may also prove useful in many other medical settings, such as emergency rooms (ERs). Instead of relying on a standard waiting list, patients could be equipped with networked wireless monitors of their vital signs, allowing doctors to determine who in a waiting room needs the most immediate care.


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