770HealthTech

Healthcare Input: mission impossible? Possible solutions

I was just about to write a post reviewing my Nokia 770 as an input device for study coordinators and investigators in clinical research, when I noticed a post in Colin Jervis' Future Health IT blog entitled Healthcare Input: mission impossible?. Colin sums up nicely some of the negative things I was about to write, including one or two that hadn't occurred to me. Ultimately, to my surprise, it made me more optimistic about devices like the Nokia 770 than I had been before I read his article.

Nokia 770 Update

It has been a while since I have posted about my work with the Nokia 770, which is because I haven't done anything much with it other than use it the past few weeks. Today I do have some progress to report on the development front.

"When The Long Tail Wags The Dog" - implications for health IT and the Nokia 770.

The entry When The Long Tail Wags The Dog on Dan Bricklin's Website takes a whole different view of "The Long Tail". Are there implications for health information technologies?

Light Blue Optics: miniature laser-driven holographic projectors

This from a comment on my Minority Report post: Light Blue Optics is demonstrating holographic laser projectors small enough to fit into bulkier PDAs and cell phones. LBO is looking for manufacturing partners to whom it can become an OEM supplier. It turns out someone "stole" my idea over a year ago at least. More power to them!

Minority Report

I saw  this entry in HealthNex which is actually a guest post by Doug Krell, MD. It talks about the future of healthcare IT from the perspective of thinking about what was in the movie Minority Report. It got me thinking too.

Nokia 770, part one

SO- I have had my Nokia 770 for a few days, and am waiting for my 1GB RS-MMC to arrive. The 64MB chip that comes with it may be adequate for casual users, but I want to do some development on it.

I can already see that in its out-of-the-box configuration it is not ready for prime time in a healthcare environment, even the relatively relaxed environment of a GCRC's inpatient unit.  It looks and probably is somewhat fragile, though Forbes ran a story about a Nokia executive hurtling his across the room into a wall without hurting the instrument. I'm not sure clinicians and support staff will believe it is that rugged (I certainly can't, sitting here holding it).  One solution might be to have the hapless persons responsible for deployment hurtle theirs at the wall during training to demonstrate how tough the little things are, while fervently praying that Murphy's Law is somehow momentarily suspended.

But the biggest problem is also its biggest advantage, an 800x480 display. This is enough pixel-width to provide adequate display of many websites, but its 800 pixels across are on a screen about 4 inches on the diagonal, not 14", 15" or 17" like most folks now have if they use computers intensively. A colleague of mine tested his with some typical forms used in electronic data capture, and found that the type was almost too small to read and certainly too small for patients or for use in low-light conditions.

Moreover, a common usability flaw in Web-based workplace data entry software is using too much screen real estate for vanity decorations (e.g., logos and slogans), and titles across the top of the page, and often the sides as well. Product vendors, including health center IT product architects, seem to be afraid that the worker bees will forget where they work or what product they are using.  If the UI designer allocates space for such things across the top and left sides of the page using typical assumption of 1024x768 pixel screen dimensions, the available visible screen real estate can be reduced by as much as 50%, forcing potentially vital information or data capture points out of the area to which the user is attending.

I'm going to get a ruggedness test done this week, assuming I can convince my colleague to hurl his 770 at the wall with sufficiently believable force. (Not.)  I'm also going to try to put together a Typepad blog site whose template has been adjusted to fit the 770 screen and increased font size for better readability. Hopefully with some experimentation and some collegial interaction, we'll find a way to put this beautiful little machine to work.

On the good-news side, the Wi-Fi works beautifully.

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

I just ordered a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet (this is the USA link - you may want to go to your country's Nokia page if you are not in the US). I expect it will be an example of the disruptive technologies I was talking about in my last post.

I really think it will be a disruptive technology, a product not good enough for the current market, but satisfactory to tech enthusiasts and early adopters. To see why I think this without having it in hand, read the review from Steven Frank's blog: ~stevenf: Nokia 770 Review. From what I have seen so far (and I actually have had one in hand for a few minutes), it will not be a polished commercial product.

I want to test it out as an alternative to heavy laptops, overly expensive tablet PCs, and overly tiny PDAs for carry-around data entry in a healthcare environment. I expect the capabilities in this regard will be truly abysmal at present. For one thing, its target applications are email and Web browsing. From the review and from a friend's experience using one, its Web interface is not bad but the email client is abysmal. The Web interface uses a really tiny font to get as much page on the screen at one time as possible. This will make it difficult to use for data entry generally, but especially in low-light and/or chaotic conditions.

It also has limited RAM, which means Web forms will need to be very lean. Most form developers write verbose HTML and Javascript code, and and most HTML editors don't help much in this regard.

However, it is a start, a first step on the disruptive trajectory underlying the laptop, tablet, and PDA market trajectories, which are already in "feature overkill" mode for many users.

It is a Linux system, and is already accumulating a developer community (e.g., see the Internet Tablet Talk site) though it has only been on the market for a little while. 'Twill be interesting to see what gets developed for it. I haven't explored what is already available yet, so maybe there are already some useful apps out there. Maybe even a development environment specifically targeted at developing Web apps for this platform? (he said hopefully...)

I will post my experiences with it here as they happen and as I get time.