[CeBIT] senSave - Mobile Medical Assistant
Submitted by John Boxall on March 21, 2007 - 3:12am.
Moving low-risk patients out of hospitals and back into their homes has been a goal of the health care system for some time. Studies have shown that patients who placed back into their home recover faster and the beds they this relocation frees up in hospitals can be used to better treat high risk patients. Still, low-risk patients moved back into their homes require medical supervision ensure they become no risk patients or at least remain low risk. Costs prohibit providing care worker supervision for in-home patients 24/7 and patients can go weeks without in-home visits by professionals. Mobile medical technology offers one solution for providing in-home patients with better service while reducing the need for care-worker visits.
On display from the Fraunhofer Institute of Software and Systems Engineering was senSave, a PDA based mobile health assistant (in German, mobiler gesundheitsassistent) used to help care workers monitor in-home patients. Patients are given a touch screen PDA which runs the senSave application. On its most basic level, senSave reminds patients to take their medications. It is also used record daily diets. This patient data is synced daily with a central database where care workers can analyse it. If the patient is forgetting to their meds having too much marmalade care workers can make not of it and correct the situation.
While this basic system is great for helping care workers to monitor low risk patients it doesn't account for the possibly of something catastrophic happening while a care worker is not present. To complement the PDA system, patients can be given a sensor suite to monitor their vital statistics. These sensors transmit data back to the senSave PDA. If senSave judges the vitals to be abnormal it begins transmitting data back to the medical center where staff can make the decision whether or not to initiate a medical response or call the patient to make sure everything is okay. In addition to perhaps saving lives, this system gives patients an added sense of security as they know someone is always watching over them, even if it is just digitally.
With the technology to identify things like heart attacks from vital statistics, why not give the general population the option of being monitored by a system like senSave? In it's current form, the sensor suite is too bulky to be worn comfortably for day to day activities, but it's easy to imagine a future where the sensors could be incorporated directly into clothing, jewelry or the mobile phone. By tracking long-term trajectories in patients' vitals, potential health problems could be identified and resolved before they become actual problems. Patients showing abnormal signs could be identified and contacted. Medical responses could be dispatched for patients showing signs of extreme distress. Doctors would have access to long term patient data from which to better base their decisions.
While we probably won't see healthy people walking around with monitoring sensors anytime soon, mobile health monitoring could be a real benefit to the boomers. We'll be seeing more mobile applications like senSave in the near future.
-jb
On display from the Fraunhofer Institute of Software and Systems Engineering was senSave, a PDA based mobile health assistant (in German, mobiler gesundheitsassistent) used to help care workers monitor in-home patients. Patients are given a touch screen PDA which runs the senSave application. On its most basic level, senSave reminds patients to take their medications. It is also used record daily diets. This patient data is synced daily with a central database where care workers can analyse it. If the patient is forgetting to their meds having too much marmalade care workers can make not of it and correct the situation.
While this basic system is great for helping care workers to monitor low risk patients it doesn't account for the possibly of something catastrophic happening while a care worker is not present. To complement the PDA system, patients can be given a sensor suite to monitor their vital statistics. These sensors transmit data back to the senSave PDA. If senSave judges the vitals to be abnormal it begins transmitting data back to the medical center where staff can make the decision whether or not to initiate a medical response or call the patient to make sure everything is okay. In addition to perhaps saving lives, this system gives patients an added sense of security as they know someone is always watching over them, even if it is just digitally.
With the technology to identify things like heart attacks from vital statistics, why not give the general population the option of being monitored by a system like senSave? In it's current form, the sensor suite is too bulky to be worn comfortably for day to day activities, but it's easy to imagine a future where the sensors could be incorporated directly into clothing, jewelry or the mobile phone. By tracking long-term trajectories in patients' vitals, potential health problems could be identified and resolved before they become actual problems. Patients showing abnormal signs could be identified and contacted. Medical responses could be dispatched for patients showing signs of extreme distress. Doctors would have access to long term patient data from which to better base their decisions.
While we probably won't see healthy people walking around with monitoring sensors anytime soon, mobile health monitoring could be a real benefit to the boomers. We'll be seeing more mobile applications like senSave in the near future.
-jb
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