Interactive Systems for Health (Week 7)

This is the topic I have been patiently waiting for as my major area of specialisation is Health Informatics and I am particularly interested in seeing the trends in this are.
After going through the key papers, I had a good idea of the meaning and usefulness of this topic but I was looking forward to listening to the presenters as well as seeing new inventions in this area.
The presenters started by explaining the various relationships between Information Technology and medicine, which includes;

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Informatics
• Ubiquitous computing

I found great interest in the Bridge project which was said to be a project for poor families to teach them how to eat right and providing them with various classes.
The various types of technologies in medicine were grouped and explained as follows;

• Healthcare technologies at home: These are essentially used to do things which are difficult for people to do as well as monitor the health state of patients. They are also used to generate data for patients and these data are used to find cures for illnesses by the doctors that retrieve these data.
• Emergency Detection sensors: These monitor temperature,nutrition,fever,cardiac activities,stroke, diabetic coma, asthmatic attack and so on; and ensures that if there is a change in these parameters, the health personnels are alerted.
• Assistive Robots: This is the use of smart robots to relate with humans and also to analyse any change in the user's environment or health. An example was shown of a robot doing house chores.
• Technology at Hospitals: The use of technology in hospitals has led to a reduction in death by 17%. The NHS is an avid user of technology as shown in the video during the presentation. They also use technology to ensure patients' get their drugs.

Health related technologies can be useful from the patient's perspective (iphone app, Telemedicine, interactive TV, dummy simulators) and from the health providers' perspective. The major challenges of such technologies include high cost while its major advantage is the provision of better health care.
Below are the links for the key papers for this topic;
https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=336740
https://studydirect.sussex.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=336744

Here are some really useful health technologies I discovered;
http://www.life-recovery.com/site/video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlYe1VvE_Uo&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27QNiz8iDb0&feature=player_embedded