Archive for Hardware
Wireless Health Monitoring System
Beijing Perfect Sky Information Technology Co. Ltd. presented a demonstration of their vision for health monitoring via wireless technology. Their appropriately named Wireless Health Monitoring System is designed to keep physicians and concerned relatives informed of changes in the health of a remote patient. This technology has broad reaching potential both in China, where many people are moving to the city for work and wiring money back to family in smaller towns, as well as in rural areas in other countries around the globe.
The system monitors health data for cardiogram readings, pulse, blood pressure, body temperature and a number of other factors to track changes in vital signs. Data is sent wirelessly to a server that tracks patient information to check for any changes that represent an out-of-normal condition. In the event of a dramatic change in health status, the service will alert physicians, family and anyone else scheduled to be notified in an emergency.
There are several scenarios where this Wireless Health Monitoring System might offer critical feedback. Often people go to the doctor complaining of an ailment, but do not exhibit the symptoms during their appointment with the doctor. With a wireless monitoring system, a patient can wear a monitor outside of the medical facility and automatically notify the doctor of any abnormal symptoms through the wireless monitor as they happen. For people with elderly parents living a long distance away or people without relatives to check in on their well being, the Wireless Health Monitoring System provides a method of insurance to make sure a sudden heart attack or other life threatening illness is discovered quickly through ongoing monitor of vital signs. A third interesting scenario would be a wireless monitoring system that keeps track of vital signs and notifies a patient when it’s time for them to take a medication to prevent additional health complications, like low insulin levels, for instance.
Unfortunately, Beijing Perfect Sky Information Technology Co. Ltd. does not have a web site related to their Wireless Health Monitoring System as of this writing. For more information on the project, the company can be reached at their Beijing offices:
地址：东城区 和平里东街 民旺乙19号 中粮凯达大厦308室
城市：北京
省份：北京
国家：中国
邮编：100083
主要联系电话 13801354892
主要传真号码 010-64275627
NETV Health Management and Media Platform
NETV pitched a three-tiered service offering that couples health information services in medical facilities with individual member offerings that are proposed as a method for individual to educate, plan and keep track of medical information. On one end of the spectrum, the company is working to get IPTV-connected screens in health care facilities around China (the plan is to have 200 screens in 90 hospitals by the end of 2006). These screens provide information to patients at the hospital who need more details about their health care options and provide revenue to NETV through advertising. Additional fees would be generated through the sale of terminals, although I can’t imagine too many medical facilities purchasing a screen and then allowing the seller to generate advertising revenue post purchase. On the member side of the equation, NETV is proposing a fee-based member service for managing health care, identifying preferred providers and negotiating discounts on rates, which sounds a little like a HMO in the U.S. although the company doesn’t draw the comparison in its proposal.
NETV appears to be in a more challenging position than any of the other companies presenting at DEMO China for a number of reasons. The idea of providing screens capable of delivering individualized medical information to people in a hospital is valid, but a goal of approximately 2 screens per hospital is far too low to make any significant impact in providing patient education. At best that represents a limited beta test, which would be better concentrated in one hospital to get adequate coverage.
Unless the medical information is generalized to the point of mass consumable for everyone sitting in a waiting room, the line to get more information at these kiosk stations will be longer than the waiting list to see doctors because the daily patient load at any hospital is far too high for 2 screens to be highly effective. From an advertising perspective, if too few people are seeing the advertisements, the paying advertisers will take their dollars elsewhere to get a better reach.
On the member side, if NETV is in a position to negotiate better rates for patients, they may have a market. From what I understand of Chinese health insurance, people who want adequate coverage are currently looking outside the country. Even providing a means of convenient scheduling may assist improving patient experience dramatically, although it’s hard to say whether anyone would pay for that convenience (they certainly wouldn’t in the U.S.) If they are simply providing information to patients, thousands of resources internationally provide an outstanding breadth of information in most of the known languages of the world at little or no cost to the reader. The U.S. has yet to see any healthcare sites with significant numbers of paying subscribers and already saw a number of online healthcare failures during the 2001 dotcom fallout.
NETV cites HealthMedia as a direct competitor in the LCD healthcare information business. NETV claims an advantage in providing data via real time playback and interactive broadcasting, compared to HealthMedia’s use of DVD information playback. While this could be a potential advantage, without a massive penetration of screens in each hospital to support all potential patients, I can’t see the company effectively meeting patient needs on an individual basis. More likely, HealthMedia is providing generalized information that doesn’t require interactivity and reaches a broad audience simultaneously. Seeing more than 50 people swarmed around a television in a Tianjin alley makes me think there’s currently a large market for mass health education initiatives.
Maybe there’s more to what’s planned than meets the eye. Under the hood at NETV, they maintain a portal for streaming movies, television and adult content in something that appears to be linked to founder Haiyan Peng’s streaming company Blue Sword.
Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System
Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd. presented the Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System (FGJAS) as a cost effective method for early detection of stomach cancer in patients. According to statistics presented by Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd., the incidence of stomach cancer among people in China remains quite high as compared to stomach cancer rates in other parts of the world. The company cites the prevalence of widespread access to endoscopic and barium tests in countries like the U.S. and Japan as a key reason that stomach cancer is caught early and more effectively treated in those countries. According to the presentation, the expense of endoscopic and barium tests make them less widely available throughout China, despite a continued need to detect and treat stomach cancer more effectively.
The FGJAS system works by gather gastric juice and analyzing it for particular characteristics common to Helicobacter pylori (a bacteria that causes digestive illnesses like gastritis and peptic ulcer disease) as well as proteins in the stomach commonly associated with the existence of stomach cancer.
Through testing done by the company results averaged 83.58% sensitivity, 81.57% specificity, with a diagnostic index of 165.15. I’m not a medical expert, so I don’t pretend to know how that compares with competing detection methods. By the company’s own acknowledgement in documentation provided about the FGJAS project, it’s not suggesting the FGJAS is a substitute for other types of testing. It appears to be best used in conjunction with other methods of testing, while better than not testing at all in situations where resources for acquiring more expensive testing equipment are not available.
Based on presented information, the cost of endoscopic equipment is in the 600,000 -800,000 Yuan range, which translates to roughly US $75,000-100,000. The associated procedure is about $150-200 yuan (US $19-25). Barium testing equipment is 300,000-600,000 Yuan (US $38,000-75,000) with procedures priced in the 50-60 Yuan range. By their estimate, the Yinchaun Kangjie Science and Technologies Co, Ltd., Fluorescence Gastric Juice Analytic System costs 30,000-50,000 Yuan with a price of 50-60 Yuan per procedure. While the actual procedural costs don’t sound that high as compared with common co-pay amounts here in the U.S., salaries in China are not comparable and a single test may be as much as 10% of a patient’s annual income in many parts of China.
The company applied for U.S. patents for unique aspects of the detection system, adding intellectual property to the overall value proposition for what they are seeking to fund. According to research provided, 15 medical facilities in Ningxia are currently using the FGJAS system as part of their regular diagnosis of gastric ailments.
The key thing that makes this project interesting is its potential to help provide an essential service at a dramatically lower cost than the current available options. For developing countries around the world, that presents an opportunity for people to get treatment they weren’t previously receiving. If the test results provide accurate health care information, it may even be disruptive to existing solutions in developed nations, encouraging other small companies to develop affordable alternatives to other types of diagnosis and treatment, and potentially driving down health care costs in the same way that the Web has disrupted many traditional business practices and lowered costs in other industries. At the very least, wider adoption of this technology many mean dramatically lower incidence of chronic stomach pain. At the core, a more dramatic change will happen in dealing with chronic stomach issues when the bacterial source of chronic stomach issues is dealt with through wider availability of clean water and sanitation throughout China.
Mvox Duo Wearable Voice-Dialing Communicator
In a rather dramatic introduction, Mvox walked through a demonstration promising to throw out all your existing wired communication devices and replace it with a hands-free voice activated solution for dialing, talking, and communicating (in the demo they called Yao Ming). The Mvox DUO is both a Bluetooth headset and hands-free car kit with speaker phone. The speaker phone capability allows it to double as a portable conference room phone and it integrates with VoIP over Bluetooth, assuming your computer is Bluetooth equipped.
The idea here is that by clipping the DUO to your lapel, you get easy access for both talking via speaker phone as well as issuing voice commands. For a more private conversation, an ear fitting turns the communicator into a headset similar to most of the existing Bluetooth rigs. Noise cancellation was demonstrated with The Phantom of the Opera blaring in the background while still successfully issuing voice commands, which either proves the voice recognition works well against loud noises or that they successfully designed a way to tune out Andrew Lloyd Weber (if it’s the latter, I’ll invest). Small array microphones are used to improve both speech recognition and noise cancellation, which is what makes DUO different from existing devices. Mvox is based in Cupertino, so I’m not entirely sure what makes this unique for the Chinese market, as it seems geared toward anyone who spends a great deal of time on the phone.
In their own words: “Mvox Duo is the world鈥檚 first wearable smart communicator with one-touch voice dialing. It鈥檚 a handsfree car kit, Bluetooth headset, mobile conference phone, and VoIP headset …all in one small wearable device. Innovative features include near 100% voice recognition, superior noise and echo cancellation through patent-pending small array microphone technology, and a holistic design integrating headset and speakerphone. Ideal for road warriors and commuting drivers to enjoy handfree, loud and clear conversations anywhere without sacrificing road safety.”
I’ll apologize now for the photos - after the company found out I was American, they wouldn’t let me take better shots because they haven’t announced the device in the U.S. just yet. Someday, companies need to remember that the Internet has no borders.
MobiWallet RFID Payment System from Jton Systems
MobiWallet, the product demoed by Jton Systems at DEMO China, promises to combine cell phone SIM cards with a refillable RFID debit payment system to handle micro-payment transactions like paying for public transportation or buying a cup of coffee. While micro-payments using a cell phone have been done in other ways tied to cell phone bills and item specific cell phone numbers, this looks a little more practical. On the administration side of the equation, you configure the minimum amount you want to keep available on the card, as well as the refill amount if the balance drops below the minimum. The phone periodically compares the RFID balance against the minimum amount and automatically negotiates the refill transaction in the background, so you are never left with a low balance. The RFID stores the information and briefly wakes up when it encounters a payment interface, debits the money from the balance and communicates the change back to the MobiWallet server. For handling things like subway payments in Beijing, this seems like a no-brainer, as there are already card based solutions doing something similar. This eliminates the card and ties it to the phone that almost everyone in the city is carrying. The hurdle is getting China Mobile and China Unicom to sign on to replacing existing SIM cards with the RFID integrated cards.
In the U.S. carrier adoption is likely a bigger hurdle, as the carriers tend to shy away from adding things that might actually be useful to their customers and there’s no existing infrastructure of working RFID transaction systems. Long term, having a way to dump my Starbucks card, Jamba Juice Card, and the 20 other cards in my wallet, in favor of something connected to the one thing I never leave home without only makes sense.
You can hear an interview with Steve Edelson of Jton Systems on The Chris Pirillo Show.
The photo above is the interface showing the balance remaining for various accounts on the RFID. Below shows that the RFID is the same as what is currently going into wallet card style payment systems with a SIM integrated.
