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... :-)

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.