Geez, I'd settle for a reliable means of reminding my mom to take all of
her pills on time throughout the day~! Bought her a VoiceCue but it
didn't adapt for Daylight Savings Time and her sister managed to
deprogram it. Took HOURS to set up the 10 voice message reminders (that
her sis erased) so I give up. Any suggestions on products (non-computer)
would be greatly appreciated!

~ Greyling

-----Original Message-----
From: Parkinson's Information Exchange Network
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of M.Schild
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2005 10:37 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Digital health

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1875201,00.asp

NEW YORK-Intel Corp. has a prescription for enhancing healthcare in the
future: Increasing the dose of computer technology.



The chipmaker, which established a new Digital Health Group as part of a
broad
reorganization earlier this year, is preparing to trial a laptop-like
device
that could aid in the care of people suffering from Parkinson's disease.
The
device conducts a battery of tests to measure their symptoms and stores
the
data for doctors to access. Intel researchers plan to begin medical
trials of
the machine, which they say can be used to tracks the patients' symptoms
more
closely by repeating the tests weekly at home versus a doctor's office
visit
every few weeks, with about 60 patients in January.




Intel isn't poised to enter the medical devices business with the
tester,
however. Instead, the device represents one of numerous opportunities
the
chipmaker sees in applying its forte-designing chips and the systems
that
surround them-to healthcare. To that end, researchers inside the
company's
labs-many of whom are now affiliated with the Digital Health Group
following
the reorganization-have been experimenting with numerous ways to use
fairly
standard computer chips, software and networking technologies, including
RFID
(radio frequency identification) tags, to assist doctors and their
patients
as well as aid in the care of aging populations around the globe.


"This is not going to make a laptop replace a nurse. That's not what
we're
thinking," said Manny Vara, a technology strategist inside Intel's
research
labs, while demonstrating several of Intel's healthcare-oriented
research
projects for Ziff Davis Internet during an event in New York City.


However, "We think some of this is very promising," he said.


Click here to view a slideshow from the Intel healthcare event.


Intel researchers envision sensor networks that use RFID tags to help
monitor
the daily activities of elderly people, for example. By gathering data
from
RFID-tagged household implements, even including drinking cups, a
network
could track a person's movements throughout a house and therefore deduce
whether he or she was capable of performing day-to-day activities or
track
whether medications were being taken on time, Vara said.


"You can deduce what [your grandmother] is doing by looking at what'
she's
touching" around the house, he said.





Intel is also working on a digitized pill box that can tell when someone
takes
pills.


What's good for Grandma can also work for baby. The company's
researchers, in
another health-related project demonstrated on Thursday, have devised a
high-tech baby monitoring system, which will help parents track their
babies'
health automatically.


Although Intel is not in the business of selling RFID tags or pill
boxes, it
does stand to gain from the digitization of healthcare. The Parkinson's
tester for example, uses hardware Intel originally created for PDAs,
Vara
said. It could also be modified to measure motor skills to track the
recovery
of stroke victims.


Discerning what a person is doing by tracking her movements throughout
her
house takes a fair amount of computing horsepower, potentially opening
up new
opportunities for Intel-processor servers.


Eventually, data culled from the high-tech baby monitoring research
project
could yield greater home PC sales or spark upgrades, if the hooks needed
to
carry it out were added to its processors and chipsets for desktops or
notebooks.


Numerous Intel researchers were on hand at an event in New York City on
Thursday where they discussed projects, including the Parkinson's
tester,
digital pill box, sensor networks as well as others such as
location-aware
wireless networks. But the Digital Health Group also had its coming out
party
a few months ago at Intel's fall Developer Forum in San Francisco.


There, the group's General Manager, Louis Burns discussed the benefits
of
IT-enabling patients, doctors and instruments to create more consistent
care
during a keynote address at the forum.


Burns touted other potential healthcare benefits. Electronic
prescription
processing could replace written prescriptions, he said.


Burns also demonstrated connected blood-pressure cuffs, thermometers and
pulse
readers that could chart information instantly onto a patient's medical
record, in another example of networked medical devices.


That interoperability has the most power to improve health care, he said
during the speech.


"If you optimize just one component of the [health care] system, you
just
shift the bottleneck," he said.


Intel plans to reveal more detailed product information next spring, he
said
in the keynote.


Check out eWEEK.com's Desktops & Notebooks Center for the latest news in
desktop and notebook computing.

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