WirelessDoc

WSJ: The Future of Wireless

Real Time - WSJ.com

Jason Fry checks in with a blog post subtitled: ISPs, businesses, and even cities seek to offer cheap or free connections--which will win?

Nothing new here, except for mention of the recent Fon/Time Warner Cable deal, and the opinion by Dana Spiegel of NYCwireless who is "skeptical of the deal's impact, seeing it as little more than a public-relations move for both companies."

The Fon USA CEO acknowledges that there are only 60,000 "Foneros" in the US, with more of a view toward the future for a workable network.

There does appear to be agreement that muni Wi-Fi projects are likely to be complementary to the efforts of the ISPs and other commercial wireless providers.

Fry talks about the "much-hyped WiMax," which might be a tad too cynical considering the commitment by such companies as Sprint, and the device manufacturers.

Spiegel, using air conditioning as an analogy, makes the point that wireless broadband access, once considered a luxury (or "much hyped"), will be seen as a necessity for communication and commerce.

Technorati Tags: NYCwireless, FON, Time Warner Cable, Foneros, WiMax, ISP, Wi-Fi,

Blue Cross/Blue Shield's free EHR will cover 11 million people

Health insurer offering free electronic health records to doctors in four states

I guess the headline writer meant to say a "free electronic health records *system*."

The Health Care Service Corp., which runs Blue Cross and Blue Shield operations in Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, has been working for two years to merge the plans' various IT systems that contain data about eligibility, medication, lab visits, hospitalization and physician office visits into a single system. The Chicago-based company plans to provide its patients and doctors with free access to the integrated system.

The HCSC uses a system provided by MEDecision Inc.'s Patient Clinical Summary software.

Technorati Tags: EHR, BCBS, Health Care Service Corp, MEDecision

Mobilized! in NYC, May 5 & 6

This is the public event, Mobilized: exploring mobile and public space.

"Mobilized! an event that focuses on mobile communications media practices and technologies and the ways they are rapidly changing public space and social interaction." They describe this as an "unconference" in the sense that it's not meant to be a panel of experts lecturing but rather more about participation from the attendees.

Joshua picks up this description:

    * A kickoff event with keynote by Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library.

    * A showcase of student, artist, community and new business projects and mobile video and project awards.

* Workshops focused on creating platforms and projects on mobile devices including new tools like Python, Java Micro Edition (J2ME), Microsoft’s .NET Mobile Edition, Flash Lite, Google Maps and Mobile, Mobile Processing, and a look at how they are being used in areas from open source telephony and mobile video blogging, to mobile gaming and locative urbanism with noted designers, programmers and artists.

They have a wiki, where you can add your name to the attendee list.

The May 5th event will be held at Eyebeam on 540 W. 21st St., while the next day's event will be at Brooklyn Polytech, Six MetroTech CTR, Brooklyn.

Technorati Tags: Mobilized NYC, Eyebeam, Brooklyn Polytech, J2ME, .NET Mobile Edition, Flash Lite, Google Maps, Google Mobile

NY Fire Dept. test Northrop Grumman's wireless system at 7 World Trade Center

San Jose Mercury News - NYFD drill at ground zero tests L.A. corp.'s wireless technology

This drill happened yesterday at the WTC site through NYC's Dept. of Information Technology & Telecommunications. "Officials tested sending surveillance video from the building's 50th floor to the network operations center and from there to the fire department's operations center in Brooklyn, allowing them to monitor the scene remotely...."

Northrop Grumman, a global defense and technology company with more than 120,000 employees, will equip, build and maintain the system for five years and provide technical support to city technology officials.

MobileShield might be the product they're testing.

They were also testing the ability to send blueprints electronically before the firefighters are dispatched.

This is part of the $500 million citywide data network including the formation of an elite group of firefighters, which are expected to be operational in spring 2008.

Technorati Tags: World Trade Center, NYFD, wireless

OhioHealth partners with RxNT for ePrescribing

OhioHealth Adopts New ePrescribing System for All of Its 2,300 Physicians

This will provide all of OhioHealth's 2300 physicians a chance to use this ePrescribing tool the supports both Pocket PC and Palm OS.

The RxNT system will connect to the Pharmacy Health Information Exchange™, operated by SureScripts®, which facilitates the secure, electronic transmission of new prescriptions and refill requests between physicians and pharmacists. Today, more than 95 percent of all pharmacies in the United States are certified to connect to the Pharmacy Health Information Exchange.

Technorati Tags: OhioHealth, RxNT, Pharmacy Health Information Exchange, ePrescribing, SureScripts

Update for Telzuit's wireless STATPATCH Holter monitor software

Mobile Handhelds: Telzuit Medical Technologies: Technology
Here's a news item from Wireless Workforce Online about updates for mobile handhelds using the STATPATCH system:

• Successful migration to Windows Mobile 5.0
• Palm Treo issues resolved
• Windows XP laptop version in final stages of development. This is being developed with CyberTV
• FTP of Palm O/S  devices to the Telzuit server is working
• Human testing of all versions is ongoing

A description of STATPATCH from the Telzuit Web site:

The STATPATCH™ System is a fully mobile, wireless biometric cardiac data collection system. Our system combines powerful, state-of-the-art technology to transmit, receive, and store a patient’s biometric cardiac data.

A comfortable, wireless patch is applied in seconds on a patient to be monitored. Utilizing Bluetooth® technology, the STATPATCH™ transmits ECG data to a smartphone that patients either carry with them or place within 30 feet of themselves. Data is transmitted by the smartphone to an independent diagnostic testing facility that stores, and processes this data. Healthcare providers can rapidly access reports via a dedicated HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)-compliant Web site.

Technorati Tags: medical wireless, holter, Telzuit, CyberTV

Google Speaker Series: Luiz Barroso

                 

[This is the video of the April Speaker Series at the NYC Google offices that I reported on earlier this month. It's now posted at the Google Video Web site. I used their feature that automatically creates a blog post and embeds the video as you can see above. It also adds the text you see in the following paragraphs.] When your computer begins to look more like a warehouse than a pizza box or a refrigerator, some things that you might otherwise treat as annoying afterthoughts become first order design considerations. The size of our computing infrastructure has given us some early hands-on experience with issues that are now at the forefront of computer science, such as energy-efficiency, fault-tolerance, and thread-level parallelism. In this talk I will try to present some of the broad lessons we have learned as well as our recent research results on disk drive failure analysis and datacenter-level power efficiency. Luiz André Barroso is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he has worked across  several engineering areas, ranging from applications to software infrastructure and hardware design. His projects have included a system to find related academic articles, designing load-balancing software, networking and server performance optimizations, failure analysis, power provisioning, and leading the design of Google's computing platform. Prior to Google he was a member of the Research Staff at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporations, where his group did some of the pioneering work on processor and memory system design for commercial workloads. They also designed Piranha, a system based on an aggressive chip-multiprocessing architecture. The work on Piranha has had a significant impact in the microprocessor industry, helping inspire many of the multi-core CPUs that are now in the mainstream. Before joining Digital he was one of the designers of the USC RPM, an FPGA-based multiprocessor emulator for rapid hardware prototyping. He has also worked at IBM Brazil's Rio Scientific Center and lectured at PUC-Rio (Brazil) and Stanford University. Luiz has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro.

Tags: Google, datacenter, fault-tolerance, energy-efficiency

FDA proposals for update to Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act (MDUFMA II)

The FDA is soliciting public comments on its proposals to Congress for MDUFMA II. These proposals are meant to ensure prompt approval of medical devices that have shown efficacy and safety. Public comment will be accepted until the middle of May, with a public meeting to be held on April 30.

This fee program has industry cover the costs of the FDA's pre-market review program.

Main proposal points:

Performance goals - "FDA would reach a decision on 50 percent of expedited pre-market approval (PMA) applications and expedited supplement applications within 180 days; 90 percent within 280 days. In addition, FDA would reach a decision on 90 percent of 510(k) applications within 90 days; 98 percent within 150 days." The FDA will report its performance record on a quarterly basis.

Help for small business -

•   no fees for first-time PMA submissions to small businesses with $30 million or less in annual sales or receipts;
• further reductions in full fees for 510(k) application submissions (from 80 percent to 50 percent) and for PMA submissions and related supplements (from 38 percent to 25 percent) for small businesses with $100 million or less in annual sales or receipts; and
• a provision for foreign business entities to qualify as small businesses.

Predictable fees - "Manufacturers would continue to pay fees when they submit applications for some types of medical devices, but at a lower and more stable rate than under the current program. The proposal would add several additional fees, which would generate about 50 percent of the total fee revenue and be more stable than application fees."

Fact Sheet: FDA Legislative Package for Next Medical Device User Fee Program (April 16, 2007)

For more information, visit www.fda.gov/cdrh/mdufma/.

Technorati Tags: FDA, MDUFMA, medical devices,

Palm: ePrescribing Web page

This is Palm's present take on ePrescribing, featuring iScribe and PatientKeeper ePrescription. I wonder if these companies will be porting their software to the new Palm Linux OS, or if it will continue to run on Garnet (present Palm OS) on top of the Linux kernel.

Palm - Healthcare Solutions - ePrescribing

Technorati Tags: iScribe, PatientKeeper, Palm, Garnet, Linux

Wi-Fi: a chicken in every pot

"A [free-range] chicken in every pot and a [hybrid] car in every garage." - Herbert Hoover

This is my first and most probably last post relating to politics. I'm waiting for the first candidate for the presidency to guarantee broadband access for every citizen if elected. It'd probably be through WiMAX, though, or satellite for the rural citizens.

The slogan at the beginning of this post was meant to suggest the prosperity that would follow with a Hoover presidency. Now, empowerment has more to do with participating in the networks to serve your particular needs as well as helping others who share the same interests.

Tags: Wi-Fi, Herbert Hoover, broadband, politics