October 9th, 2011 by Medgadget in News
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BI, Inc. a manufacturer of compliance monitoring technology for community offenders, has announced an upgraded version of the company’s BI-TAD alcohol consumption monitoring bracelet.
The BI-TAD is an ankle-worn bracelet which measures an offender’s alcohol consumption levels through vapors and perspiration passing through the skin. The device also features radio-frequency circuitry to detect the presence of the offender in their own home at a given time. The upgraded BI-TAD sensor now includes wireless functionality allowing it to transmit compliance data through the cellular network to a remote base station. The device log can then be checked against an offender’s profile to see if he is adhering to specific curfews or drinking restrictions.
From the press release: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
September 29th, 2011 by Michael Sevilla, M.D. in Opinion
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Hey Docs out there! What if your patients found out about your most embarrassing moment from college? What if they saw a picture of it? I was watching and listening to one of my favorite technology shows over the weekend called “The Tech Guy” with tech journalist Leo Laporte.
In the brief video here, you’ll see the host take a call from an attending physician. The caller stated that back before medical school, he posed for PlayGirl magazine and now some of those pics are showing up on websites and the caller was trying to figure out how to have them taken down. It sounds like the pictures were taken in the pre-internet days. For the full exchange, click here and fast forward to the time 13:21hrs on the clock behind the host.
This call opened up the larger issue of Online Reputation which has been talked about in Health Care Social Media circles for a long time. But, it is interesting seeing what this non-medical tech journalist (and the caller) says about it: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Family Medicine Rocks Blog*
February 21st, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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Virtually all bottled beverages you can buy have handy-dandy nutrition labels from which you can access information about calories, carbs, and so forth. All beverages except the ones containing alcohol, that is. Why is that?
Maybe it’s because alcoholic beverages contain little to no protein, sodium, cholesterol, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium and iron (remember that alcohol is metabolized as a fat, not a carbohydrate) — so why bother? Then again, alcohol does contain calories — a lot of them. Would people drink less if they knew how many calories they were consuming? Would they drink less if they knew how many “servings” of alcohol were contained in the bottle they just purchased?
Maybe it’s because of the cost of performing nutritional analyses on each vintage of wine, each and every year, would turn profitable vineyards into money losers? Then again, plenty of niche beverage producers who run reasonably narrow margin businesses have never complained about the requirement to provide nutritional information.
The Tax and Trade Bureau is the federal agency that decides what information must appear on the labels of alcoholic beverages. Currently, it does not require manufacturers of wine, beer and the hard stuff to list ingredients. It does require them to list chemicals that folks might have an adverse reaction to things like sulfites, aspartame, and dyes.
The Tax and Trade Bureau also mandates that wines containing 14 percent or more alcohol by volume must state this fact on a label. Wines containing less than 14 percent can either specify the alcohol content or affix the words “light wine” or “table wine” to their labels. In addition, “light” beer bottlers must state calorie and carbohydrate content, and distilled liquor bottlers must specify the alcohol content by volume. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
