Healthcare NBIC

Top Healthcare Conversations of 2008

Many of the great healthcare thinkers and bloggers wrapped up 2008 with end-of-year considerations of the important developments in their fields, and some looked ahead with predictions for 2009. Here are the January 1, 2009 Health Memes from around the web:

Personal Genomics in 2008: the Year in Review  Genetic Future

From 2008 to 2009  ScienceRoll

Finding Venture Capital In 2009 Will Be Tough  Pharmalot

2009 Stem Cell Trendsetters in Neurology and Psychiatry  Brain Waves

The Future of Pharma  Health Beat

The Year in Bioethics: The Highs and Lows of 2008  Bioethics Forum

2008 in Review: Ethnicity Strikes Back  Dienekes' Anthropology Blog

HIT Predictions for 2009 on iHealthBeat  Health Populi

Best of Nanomedicine in 2008  Nanomedicinecenter.com

2009: Predictions Across the Web  ReadWriteWeb

Social Media Trends 2009, TrendsSpotting  ReadWriteWeb

Top 30 Brain Health and Fitness Articles of 2008  SharpBrains

Top 10 In 2008  Health Affairs Blog

Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2008 [Not Exactly Rocket Science]  ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science

Top Health Search Engines of 2008 [Highlight HEALTH]  The Highlight HEALTH Network

The Year in Biomedicine  Technology Review Feed - Biomedicine Top Stories

Health and Health Care in 2009 -- a Year of Managing Risks and Wild Cards  The Health Care Blog

(See the final week of 2008 on the December 29 archive page.)

Three Inventions from Fischell

Award-winning medical inventor and philanthropist Robert Fischell spoke at the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference about three disruptive healthcare innovations he's developing: an implantable early warning system for heart attacks, an electro-magnetic dampener for migraines, and a neurostimulator implant for preventing epileptic seizures.

(Click   to start.)

Fischell is responsible for the first implantable insulin pump, the rechargeable pacemaker, and highly flexible coronary artery stents. A physicist and engineer with three sons -- one cardiologist, one physicist and one MBA  -- as collaborators, he's the kind of natural-born inventor who takes obvious pleasure in making things work.

Real Time Monitoring for Dangerous Training

Lifeshirt, a telemetry strap developed by Ventura, CA-based VivoMetrics Government Services, monitors the ECG, blood oxygen saturation, temperature, and activity level of first responders and reports results wirelessly once-per-second to incident commanders. The devices link responder-to-responder in a mesh network or in a star topology

Lifeshirts were used last month in a $750,000 study of firefighters' training at the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute at the
University of Maryland. Wearing full turnout gear and breathing apparatus, 200 firefighters ran through a smoke-filled
obstacle course, extinguished a third-floor fire and "rescued" a 140-pound dummy from a  burning room.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security funded the study to try to reduce the number of deaths that occur in the training of firefighters. Training deaths accounted for 10 percent of all on-duty U.S. firefighter deaths in the past decade, despite a drop in the number of firefighter deaths overall. In a job where the prep work is almost as dangerous as the real thing, real time monitoring could make training camp a lot safer.

Outsourcing Intensivists

In the neurosurgery ICU at the UCLA Medical Center, recovering patient Tim Copeland mimics the hand movements of Dr. Neil Martin as part of post-op clinical assessment (click to enlarge). Dr. Martin is only virtually present, beamed in via an RP-6 robot supplied by Santa Barbara-based InTouchHealth.

UCLA reports that the robot is used for "leveraging the health care expert's time":

The patient sees, hears and interacts with the doctor through the nearly 5-foot-6-inch tall robot, which displays a live video image of the physician's face on its monitor/head. The physician, seated at a computer console called a ControlStation, also sees and hears the patient through a live video image projected on a monitor. The ControlStation comes equipped with a joystick, which allows the physician to drive the robot to the patient's bedside, control movements of the robot's head and even zoom in to take a closer look at the patient or bedside monitors.

Studies show that the presence in the ICU of intensivists, the physicians who specialize in the care of critically ill patients, can decrease morbidity, mortality, length of stay and cost of care. But in the U.S. today, there are fewer than 6,000 practicing intensivists and more than 5 million patients admitted to ICUs each year. Telepresence robots can jam more minutes of consultation into every specialist's day, but it's easy to imagine that it won't be too long before the robot is connected to cheaper doctors in developing countries, outsourcing critical care via the Internet.