770HealthTech

Progress

I've made considerable progress on my journey toward developer status on the Nokia 770, but none of it is ready to see the light of day yet. I can, however, recount what I've done and what's happened in the last couple weeks.

• I got OpenSSH server installed so I can get at the 770 from a desktop or laptop. This makes everything else so much easier.
• I got Python installed and running.
• I figured out what I need to do to get sqlite running on the 770. I'm playing with it on my tablet (i.e., my HP/Compaq TC1100) when I get time.
• I installed Django framework on my TC1100, and ran into a snag this early AM (most of my development time is between 0500 and 0630 hours). Need to hit the user forums and see what's what. That's what I get for trying to develop in Windows outside of the Microsoft camp. Got to get VMWare running on the TC1100, but I fear its cohones are too small for that beast.

I think I may have mentioned this, but my current goal is to develop a lean-and-mean case report form delivery tool for electronic data capture on any kind of device that runs on the Web - a survey delivery tool that takes into account the form factor of whatever display it has to work with. It will be data-driven using XML, or possibly SNX - an XML subset (ergo, not XML, which doesn't allow for subsets) whose acronym means "Snx is Not Xml" (with a deep bow in the direction of Richard Stallman of course). SNX only lives in my imagination at the moment; it's a reincarnation of the SML movement that flowered and withered in the early 2000's as a reaction to the Wurlitzer-like complexity of XML.

I'm going to spend some posting energy on gaming out the requirements for review by all and sundry (All? Sundry? I believe you're out there somewhere...) But not until I get my feet wet with some coding.

Imposter syndrome, the horror, the horror. I haven't coded anything in 3 years save for some minimal XSLT - used to be a master coder in C, C++, Visual Basic, Perl, javascript, etc. Let's see if there's life in these fingers still... :-)

Live from my 770

This is my very first post direct from my 770. what a pain using the onscreen keyboard!

My new/used bluetooth keyboard will be here any day now, so maybe I'll wait until then to get verbose.

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.

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.