BBC News report - Smart pens aim for better health

[[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Brian Beesley)]

On Thursday 04 September 2003 11:08, Brian Morrison wrote:
> Smart pens could soon be helping hospitals take better care of
> patients.
>
> When combined with digital paper, the pens make it much easier to track
> a patient's vital signs during their stay in hospital.
>
> By constantly capturing data about patients during routine
> examinations, it should become possible to spot problems before they
> get serious.
>
> More here:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/3197649.stm
>
> I wonder how reliable this will be in real use, and how such data will
> be stored, accessed and identified as belonging to a particular
> patient.
>
> I'm not sure that this looks like it solves any particular problem very
> well....

I can't remember the last time I had a pulse count or blood pressure measured 
manually in a hospital (though it does still get done that way in my GP's 
surgery). Since the monitoring equipment has a digital output (used to drive 
at least a 7 segment LED or LCD display) I don't see that it would take much 
to have an embedded microprocessor & a few kilobytes of memory to store the 
required record (many of these devices seem to have this capability already), 
or a Bluetooth link to the data network if you insist on having the 
information accessable from anywhere. (To medical staff with a genuine "need 
to know", of course.)

The only problem the "smart pen" solution seems to solve is the sales deficit 
of whoever builds the equipment. I rather suspect that this is just another 
attempt to sell a clever but unneccessary and expensive technology to those 
Government ministers who have a tendency to be "blinded by the light". At our 
expense, naturally.

Brian Beesley