Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

New Heart Rate Monitor Wirelessly Syncs To The iPhone

Post image for First heart rate monitor to utilize new bluetooth technology and iPhone sync hits the market

The start of January has some exciting new technologies on the horizon. Recently, Wahoo Fitness announced their new product, BlueHR — a fitness heart rate monitor — can sync to your iPhone 4s via bluetooth and without the need for addition adaptors.

All users have to do with the BlueHR device  is to strap it around their sternum, and they will be able to monitor stats such as their heart rate and the number of calories they are burning via their smartphone. It currently uses Bluetooth 4.0 technology, and as such, the only smartphone that currently has that capability is the iPhone 4S.

We wrote an in-depth article about Bluetooth 4.0 when the iPhone 4s was released, commenting on how it could be a boom for mobile health devices due to the following features of the protocol: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Researchers Develop App That Measures Many Key Vital Signs

Post image for Forget about peripheral mhealth devices, researchers use smartphone video camera to monitor useful vital signs

Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have developed a smartphone app that uses a camera to measure key vital signs. The type of technology used by the Worcester researchers is far and above more useful than a simple heart rate monitor, such as the Instant Heart Rate app.

Recently, the Instant Heart app makers received millions in funding – I hope it wasn’t based solely on the heart rate monitor app they have developed. Having a a patient’s heart rate alone isn’t that useful for a clinician, and it’s extremely easy to measure your heart rate on your own, just put your fingers to your wrist or neck.

But the work by Worcester researchers is completely different, exciting, and unlike the Instant Heart Rate app, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Three Reasons Those In The Medical Field Lament The Passing Of Steve Jobs

Post image for Three reasons why doctors mourn the passing of Steve Jobs

Doctors love their Apple Products. Just walk into any hospital ward, and see the types of mobile devices we are using. At weekly Grand Rounds conferences, you see plenty of iPads in use. At physician meetings, the laptop of choice is often the Macbook Pro. The data backs these anecdotal examples as well.

Doctors love their Apple Products – and Steve Jobs was obviously an extension of these products, often times cited as the singular force behind these products, and it’s why physicians who love his products mourn his passing.

There are three specific reasons why :

1) Simplicity

In medicine, we deal with enough complexity. Knowing disease pathology and the mechanism of various illnesses and their treatments is a fascinating exercise, but it’s taxing. For every known in medicine, there are at least five unknowns. It’s what makes being a physician exciting, but stressful as well. We’re always on high alert – especially those of us who practice in the critical care arena.

Juxtaposed to this is Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

iPhone Attachment Allows For Live View Of Eye Anatomy

There are a variety of tools available to help Ophthalmologists with eye examinations.  A new hardware and medical apps solution turns the iPhone into an ophthalmoscope.  Called the iExaminer, this simple iPhone 4 peripheral connects the popular Welch Allyn PanOptic ophthalmoscope to the iPhone 4, and then a native medical app helps you perform a fundus exams and share videos and images right from the iPhone.

Two key applications for this:

1) Teaching: For medical schools that are teaching eye examinations — instead of having to look at static pictures of eye anatomy, this “live view” could be an optimal and innovative way to teach. This could also be a great way for an ophthalmology attendings to save key eye pathology that they visualize in the mobile setting for teaching purposes.

2) Use in mobile clinics: This could be a good screening tool for various eye pathology — Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

New App Allows Patients To Directly E-mail Their Physicians

Group Health, a Seattle, Washington based nonprofit healthcare organization has launched a medical app for their members that offers a wide variety of features — even allowing members to directly e-mail their physicians.

This should come as no surprise to those who have been following this revered Health Co-op.  They have been featured by the NY Times, CNN, and other medical publications due to their innovative approach to patient care — such as embracing electronic medical records before everyone jumped on the bandwagon.

Some of the other interesting features this app will offer their patients: mobile access to medical records, which means a member can check their test results, making appointments, check immunization histories, view summaries of past visits, get routine care reminders and view their allergies and other  health conditions.

Additionally, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles