Smartphones in mobile healthcare

I have just had a new paper published on how smartphones are being used in patient education and remote health care. The paper appears here in Biomedical Engineering Online and is entitled How smartphones are changing the face of mobile and participatory healthcare. I see it has already been labelled as 'Highly Accessed' which bodes well, and of course, it is published as an open access article complete with downloadable pdf file. Written in collaboration with my colleagues in the Faculty of Health at the University of Plymouth, the paper covers a range of telehealth issues as detailed in the abstract:

The latest generation of smartphones are increasingly viewed as handheld computers rather than as phones, due to their powerful on-board computing capability, capacious memories, large screens and open operating systems that encourage application development. This paper provides a brief state-of-the-art overview of health and healthcare smartphone apps (applications) on the market today, including emerging trends and market uptake. Platforms available today include Android, Apple iOS, RIM BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows (Windows Mobile 6.x and the emerging Windows Phone 7 platform). The paper covers apps targeting both laypersons/patients and healthcare professionals in various scenarios, e.g., health, fitness and lifestyle education and management apps; ambient assisted living apps; continuing professional education tools; and apps for public health surveillance. Among the surveyed apps are those assisting in chronic disease management, whether as standalone apps or part of a BAN (Body Area Network) and remote server configuration. We describe in detail the development of a smartphone app within eCAALYX (Enhanced Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment, 2009-2012), an EU-funded project for older people with multiple chronic conditions. The eCAALYX Android smartphone app receives input from a BAN (a patient-wearable smart garment with wireless health sensors) and the GPS (Global Positioning System) location sensor in the smartphone, and communicates over the Internet with a remote server accessible by healthcare professionals who are in charge of the remote monitoring and management of the older patient with multiple chronic conditions. Finally, we briefly discuss barriers to adoption of health and healthcare smartphone apps (e.g., cost, network bandwidth and battery power efficiency, usability, privacy issues, etc.), as well as some workarounds to mitigate those barriers.

Image source by C Frank Starmer

Smartphones in mobile healthcare by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Keeping it real

I spent most of today over at the University of Portsmouth, where I led a 90 minute seminar/workshop on 'Learning 2.0: Web 2.0 in Education'. I was well looked after by several University of Portsmouth staff, inlcuding Manish Malik and his lovely wife, Emma Duke-Williams (not his wife - please refer to the separating comma), and the two Colins, Colin White and Colin Clarke. This morning Dr Clarke and his colleague Lucy Bailey took me on a tour of the ExPERT Centre (a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning), which was absolutely fascinating. One of the defining features of the Centre is its several simulation suites, including a fully equipped representation of an operating theatre, used to train student Operating Department Practitioners and Paramedics. The suite comes complete with a manikin that talks back to the students, breathes and mimics a number of other, um.... 'bodily functions'. In fact, just about the only thing it can't be programmed to do is act like my teenage daughter and constantly demand cash handouts, car rides to her boyfriend's house and back, and er... more money. All of the manikin's bodily functions can be programmed from the attached Mac computer, and the instructor can even programme in a sudden 'crisis' for the students to deal with. There are other simulated environments on the campus, including a courtroom for legal students to train in. In the ExPERT Centre I also saw a microbiology lab simulation and a simulated nursing ward. All of the above are equipped with remote controlled digital cameras and observation suites sited behind one-way mirrors.

The great thing about these kind of simulated environments is that students can build their confidence as well as their skills, while at the same time immersing themselves in realistic situations with no real risk of doing any harm. They learn by their mistakes and they also learn within situated contexts. They can also view back video footage of their performance so they can reflect on their actions and the consequences. This is clearly an expensive, but extemely powerful and effective use of technology to train professionals. In my own university next week, during the Plymouth e-Learning Conference, delegates will get the chance to visit our Dentistry school and use the Phantom Head training manikins - possibly even doing some fillings and/or pulling teeth! Simulation is obviously where it's at when it comes to the training of professionals.

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