TED MED: Bringing medicine home for better care

By Mariette DiChristina | October 29, 2009 | 1

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Eric Dishman, a behavioral scientist, was holding a battered cardboard box with a mailing label on it. He promised the audience a preview of a wonderful tool for improving elderly health care and independence at home. “You’d better get a close up of this,” he said to the cameraman recording the talk for yesterday’s TED MED conference that is running from October 27 through 30 at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, Calif. (TED MED stands for technology, entertainment, design.) Dishman, chief strategist and global director of product research, innovation and policy for Intel’s Digital Health Group, pulled out the device: an old-fashioned telephone.

Dishman was being playful, but the point was serious: technology that assists in keeping in touch with individuals who want to remain at home can help track their well-being—and in doing so they can provide a more affordable way to help maintain health than institutional settings as well. Using an analogy from the computer world, Dishman advocated a switch from the current “mainframe” health care in hospitals to systems that enable more powerful personal health care in the home.

“Behavioral markers matter,” said Dishman, who noted that Intel has studied 1,000 elderly families in 20 different countries with the idea of understanding how a change in a person’s daily patterns, or characteristic markers, of behavior could be used for diagnostic purposes. For instance, a small experimental device called a SHIMMER (for Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility and Experimental Reusability) fits into a pocket and monitors such attributes as hand tremor, gait and stride length. Another, called Magic Carpet, includes sensors embedded in carpet and also can track a person’s movements. A break in the routine could signal, for instance, that the patient’s new medication is not working correctly, he said.

Dishman hopes that technology will enable 50 percent of all care to move to the home in the next decade. Referring to the health care debate, he said, “No matter who pays for it, we better start doing care in a fundamentally different way.”

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1. Lady.Prolixus 10:07 am 11/2/2009

This is definitely a safe leap to the right direction especially to those disabled of whatever nature, with chronic diseases. The hospital environment provides unnecessary, aggravating bureaucratic restrictions that adds to the stress of random, (even needed) hospitalization for those required a safe haven such as a hospital for a 24 hour observation of the worst potential scenarios for an event that adversely impact health, or an immediate weeklong diagnostic procedures to an initial or final/last hope- therapeutic trials. I’d say this technology invention would be much more awesome if it could interact through sound, like the portable, now ubiquitous cell phones, with the capacity to send a voicemail message, if the patient retains the capacity to talk. for a description of the fine details of the ongoing event to be relayed or forwarded to the health care providers of choice. This capacity provides an easily accessible alternative to obtain crisis support by other than the 911 system, that would be a direct connection to the patient’s HCP or the HCP’s clinic/office, with a minium layer of intermediaries that an email relay and faxed messages might have, built into a system process or that are intrinsic to many hospital protocols for the receipt of such messages. [urgent or emergent, or non-critical]. But the critical factor to its usability is whether or not it would be affordable to low income families and whether or not its maintenance is also as facile as the devise is described to perform & function, linked to the lilt of its beautiful acronym, SHIMMER, alluding to hope, perhaps, its glimmer. If it could be built with an EYE, just like laptops are built, visual cues to the receiving HCP would augment the comfort of an HCP to render an accurate evaluation in a remote situation on the subtleties of clinical evaluation, and as alternative to a voice mail. I am sure the technology would evolve and fuse technologies already flooding the market in our amazing Age and Wonderland of Technology. Hmmm. What else could be brewing out there, with magic that would vanish spaces between ourselves and the mysterious, unreachable others.

Thank you for the open opportunity to comment on this article.

Lady Prolixus
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