mike schultz

Robots may one day rise up to destroy us, but these days they’re proving quite helpful, especially in medicine. Robotic surgery has developed rapidly over the past decade, and now, robots are helping patients recover too.

For the last four months, Boston Children’s Hospital has been sending some of its young patients home with a sleek, two-wheeled robot called VGo (VEE-go). With a camera, audio equipment, and an LCD screen, VGo is essentially a teleconferencing system on wheels, and doctors at Boston Children’s are using it to check in on their young patients from afar.

Wow! And what's the biggest hangup? Spotty wi-fi coverage.

There’s been a lot of debate about how to get health-care costs down in America, but simple preventative measures like this should be a no-brainer. Signs, after all, are a lot cheaper than surgery.

In a fascinating short post at fastcoexist, Andrew Price writes of gains in physical activity achieved when a simple sign, Burn Calories, not Electricity, was placed near a building's elevators. The New York Times reports today that handwashing has been promoted effectively in England by placing signs reading Don't Bring the Toilet with You in restrooms. Makes you marvel at how much you can accomplish by choosing your words carefully.

Debra Meyerson was hiking near Lake Tahoe 15 months ago when a stroke destroyed part of the left side of her brain, leaving her literally speechless. It happens to more than 150,000 Americans a year.

But now Meyerson is learning to talk again through an approach that trains the undamaged right side of her brain to "speak." Specifically, it's a region that controls singing.

Here's a fascinating story on NPR about the use of singing therapy for speech recovery after stroke. I'm interested in the technique, in the results that are possible, and in the report of using MRI in identical twins to image the changes the therapy effected. Thanks to Denise Graveline (@dontgetcaught) for digging this one out.

For another story about brain injury, see today's New York Times, When Injuries to the Brain Tear at Hearts.

Hospitals and doctors’ offices, hoping to curb medical error, have invested heavily to put computers, smartphones and other devices into the hands of medical staff for instant access to patient data, drug information and case studies.

But like many cures, this solution has come with an unintended side effect: doctors and nurses can be focused on the screen and not the patient, even during moments of critical care. And they are not always doing work; examples include a neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.

Over at the New York Times, an article about the distractions iPads and iPhones and other devices can cause for medical staff. Hard to laugh this one off, as plenty of evidence is offered, but I've got to say I trust doctors to do what they're supposed to be doing and believe that they have the sense to stay focused. Sort of like the current move to ban all cell phone use by drivers. There's plenty of distractions for a driver besides a phone, and we won't automatically be safer just because the phones are supposed to be eliminated.

Nguyen envisions robots that will be able to measure blood pressure, take a pulse, and conduct blood and urine tests, sending the information to hospital personnel for review. Robots could also be used to monitor home-bound elderly patients who can’t make it to hospitals for checkups.

@RosabethKanter steered me to this one over at Twitter. It's kind of hard for me to imagine letting a robot draw blood.

But the rest of America will most likely be left out of all this. Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive.

The Times had a heartbreaking article on the digital divide in Sunday's edition and had some eye-opening facts on how the move to technology-based services would affect those without access to technology. I was really taken by assertions about regulatory policy in he United States:

The answer to this puzzle is regulatory policy. Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.

By contrast, governments that have intervened in high-speed Internet markets have seen higher numbers of people adopting the technology, doing so earlier and at lower subscription charges.

Qualcomm is selling a gadget that aggregates data from different biosensors and medical devices in the home and plants it in a cloud database from where physicians and nurses can access real-time biometric data about their patients. Verizon Wireless is developing a “virtual care” platform, built on the back of its new LTE network, which will allow doctors to use video over smartphones and tablets to make virtual house calls. The wireless industry is moving more aggressively into telemedicine, seeing the potential of a healthcare system unfettered by wires, not to mention the huge business opportunity.

First I've heard of these.

Videos from TEDMED 2011 are now posted on the web. Looks pretty interesting.

A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that's pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.

Wasteful and even dangerous.

Imagine what this is like in a fully digital environment instead. Of course, they'd know everything about your medical history and payment ability from a quick ID scan at the entrance. And you'd know the doctor's availability before you even walked in, and you would have been shuttled to the urgent care center down the street if there was an uneven load this early in the morning. No questions to guess at the answer (last tetanus shot? Allergies to medications?) because the answers would be known. The drive to the pharmacy might be eliminated, or perhaps the waiting time would be shortened. If this accident or illness is trending, effecting more of the population, we'd know that right away and be able to prevent more of it... Triage would be more efficient as well. The entire process might take ten minutes, with a far better outcome.

School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: "That place is pre-digital."

All a way of saying that this is just the beginning, the very beginning, of the transformation of our lives.

Had an interesting talk with a doctor this week about virtual discharge, but it wasn't a satisfying conversation. Had the feeling we never quite got on the same page.