[News release] E-skin and pocket-sized diagnostic machines give patients the power back
E-skin and pocket-sized diagnostic machines give patients the power back.
From the May 2015 Elsevier news release
New bio-sensing technologies give us cheap, fast and convenient health data
Amsterdam, May 12, 2015
Wearable E-skin that can measure heart rate and blood pressure, and paper diagnostic machines the size of a credit card that can give instant readings on blood and saliva samples are two new bio-sensing technologies presented at Elsevier’s 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology in Lisbon, Portugal on 12 May 2015.
Bio-sensors can detect and analyze data to give patients information on their heart rate and blood pressure, blood sugar and hormone levels, and even test whether they are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This detection technology is a step forward in personal medicine, giving patients real-time information about how their bodies are functioning and suggesting the most suitable treatments.
Professor Anthony Turner, Head of the Biosensors & Bioelectronics Centre at Linköping University, Sweden, has developed an instrument the size of a credit card that can analyse blood and saliva samples. It is simple to use: you switch it on by pressing a button, then apply your sample to a circle in the bottom right corner and wait for a digital reading to be displayed and even sent to your mobile phone.
The whole instrument is printed on the card using a screen-printing technique. It could be used to monitor diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease, or to detect cancer. This, says Professor Turner, could turn a 2500-year-old paradigm on its head and put the power in the patient’s hands.
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This means they have the potential to provide patients and doctors in developing countries with accessible, affordable medical tests. For example, the printed card could be made part of the packaging of antibiotics, helping determine which antibiotic would be best to treat a patient’s infection.
Such printable devices could also be worn like plasters or contact lenses, transmitting information to mobile phones. Similarly, e-skin devices are also designed to be wearable and portable, and to transmit data about how a patient’s body is functioning.
Professor Ting Zhang, from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, is presenting a new kind of e-skin at the Conference. E-skin is developed based on flexible electronic technology and nanotechnology; because of its unique ability to detect tiny changes in pressure, e-skin can be used to monitor blood pressure, heart rate and wrist pulse.
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Bio-sensing technologies are gaining momentum in areas like health, the environment and security. The conference brings together leaders from industry and academia to exchange and share their experiences, present research results, explore collaborations and spark new ideas, with the aim of developing new projects and exploiting new technology for bio-sensing applications.
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Presentation details:
“The Paper Potentiostat” by Professor Anthony Turner and “Flexible Nanoelectronic Skin for Wearable/attachable Health Applications” by Professor Ting Zhang are being presented on 12 May 2015 at Elsevier’s 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology in Lisbon, Portugal.
For more information, contact Elsevier’s Newsroom at newsroom@elsevier.com or +31 20 4853564.
About the 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology
Following the success of the first 3 conferences, the 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology will continue to bring together leaders from industry and academia to exchange and share their experiences, present research results, explore collaborations and to spark new ideas, with the aim of developing new projects and exploiting new technology for bio-sensing applications. www.biosensingconference.com.
For more information go to: Elsevier Connect
http://www.elsevier.com/connect/how-printable-testing-kits-could-turn-healthcare-upside-down
[Journal Article] Search engines cannot diagnose through symptom searching – only 14% accuracy
Ever enter your symptoms into a search engine (as Google) to find what was the cause? And bring the results to your health care provider? Believe that search engines can correctly diagnose your symptoms?
A medical researcher not only was thinking along these lines. He also set up a system to see if search engines could diagnose symptoms accurately.
The results were published in a scientific paper.**
Here are some remarks from medical librarians at their discussion group.
- They don’t address the problem with these search engines of bias: Google,
Bing, track what you’ve searched on, they aren’t ‘anonymous’ engines, thus
biasing the results. A different computer, with different previous user
will give different results with these search engines. Flawed article,
in my opinion. Too bad, it is interesting.
- This article is very interesting. While it is about validating the instrument for analyzing the webpages, they found that only 14% of the website gave a correct diagnosis. Seventy percent came up with the diagnosis as part of a differential. It sort of scares me that many medical students and other healthcare students might use search engines to find differentials. One implication is that patients who bring in webpages may actually hold the appropriate differential in their internet printout. Physicians might consider that information. The article is NOT an open access journal. The abstract does not discuss the findings of accuracy since they were testing the scoring system.
My thoughts? Familydoctor.org (American Academy of Family Physicians) has great advice
Our symptom checker flowcharts allow you to easily track your symptoms and come to a possible diagnosis.
Remember, be sure to consult with you doctor if you feel you have a serious medical problem.
As a medical librarian, we counsel people to use any information they find as a resource when consulting with their health care provider. Information on the internet may be outdated, flawed, and sometimes even wrong.
Also, the health care providers views you as a whole person, not just a narrow set of symptoms. They use not only your symptoms, but other factors as health history, current and past treatments, and environmental factors to work toward a treatment plan.
Related Resources
Online symptom checkers (Standford Health System)
** Abstract from PubMed.
Full text of article not available online for free.
Might be available for free or low cost at a local public, medical, or academic libary.
Call ahead and ask for a reference librarian.
Many medical and academic libraries offer some help to the public.
Int J Med Inform. 2014 Feb;83(2):131-9. doi: 10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2013.11.002. Epub 2013 Nov 19.
The accuracy of Internet search engines to predict diagnoses from symptoms can be assessed with a validated scoring system.
- Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Family Medicine Residency at CentraState, United States. Electronic address: bshenker@centrastate.com.
[Wall Street Journal Article] The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make
From the 17 December 2013 Wall Street Journal article
A patient with abdominal pain dies from a ruptured appendix after a doctor fails to do a complete physical exam. A biopsy comes back positive for prostate cancer, but no one follows up when the lab result gets misplaced. A child’s fever and rash are diagnosed as a viral illness, but they turn out to be a much more serious case of bacterial meningitis.
Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Not only are diagnostic problems more common than other medical mistakes—and more likely to harm patients—but they’re also the leading cause of malpractice claims, accounting for 35% of nearly $39 billion in payouts in the U.S. from 1986 to 2010, measured in 2011 dollars, according to Johns Hopkins.
The good news is that diagnostic errors are more likely to be preventable than other medical mistakes. And now health-care providers are turning to a number of innovative strategies to fix the complex web of errors, biases and oversights that stymie the quest for the right diagnosis.
Part of the solution is automation—using computers to sift through medical records to look for potential bad calls, or to prompt doctors to follow up on red-flag test results. Another component is devices and tests that help doctors identify diseases and conditions more accurately, and online services that give doctors suggestions when they aren’t sure what they’re dealing with.
Finally, there’s a push to change the very culture of medicine. Doctors are being trained not to latch onto one diagnosis and stick with it no matter what. Instead, they’re being taught to keep an open mind when confronted with conflicting evidence and opinion.
“Diagnostic error is probably the biggest patient-safety issue we face in health care, and it is finally getting on the radar of the patient quality and safety movement,” says Mark Graber, a longtime Veterans Administration physician and a fellow at the nonprofit research group RTI International.
Big Efforts Under Way
The effort will get a big boost under the new health-care law, which requires multiple providers to coordinate care—and help prevent key information like test results from slipping through the cracks and make sure that patients follow through with referrals to specialists.
There are other large-scale efforts in the works. The Institute of Medicine, a federal advisory body, has agreed to undertake a $1 million study of the impact of diagnostic errors on health care in the U.S.
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Some researchers suggest the best solution isn’t to flood doctors with information but to provide a second set of eyes to find things they may have missed.
The focus now is preventing dangerous delays in follow-ups of abnormal test results. In a pilot program, researchers at the Houston VA developed “trigger” queries—a set of rules—to electronically identify medical records of patients with potential delays in prostate and colorectal cancer evaluation and diagnosis.
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More health-care systems are also turning to electronic decision-support programs that help doctors rank possible diagnoses by likelihood based on symptoms and notes in the medical record. In a study of one such system, called Isabel, researchers led by Dr. Graber found that it provided the correct diagnosis 96% of the time when key clinical features from 50 challenging cases reported in the New England Journal of Medicine were entered into the system. The American Board of Internal Medicine is studying how Isabel could be linked to assessments of physician skill and knowledge.
Journal Report
- Insights from The Experts
- Read more at WSJ.com/HealthReport
More in Unleashing Innovation: Health Care
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But such devices will never replace a thorough physical exam with a trained eye and careful follow-up, says Dr. Alexiades-Armenakas: “These diagnostic tools are aids to increase our accuracy and adjuncts to good physical diagnosis, not a substitute.”
Some efforts to cut down on errors take a different route altogether—and try to improve diagnoses by improving communication.
For instance, there’s a push to get patients more engaged in the diagnostic process, by encouraging them to speak up about their symptoms and ask the doctor, “What else could this be?”
Related articles
- When Doctors Get It Wrong (online.wsj.com)
- The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make (immortalbirdpostscript.wordpress.com)
- The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make. A MUST Read. (justransparency.wordpress.com)
- Mistakes even good doctors make (consumerreports.org)
- The gap between science and medicine; the other persons responsibility (zacione.wordpress.com)
- How to prevent the biggest kind of mistake doctors make: incorrect diagnoses (seekerblog.com)
- More Accurate and Faster Tests Needed for Infectious Diseases (medindia.net)
- Why Doctors Stay Silent About Mistakes Their Colleagues Make (psmag.com)
- Doctors reveal their worst mistakes at work (metro.co.uk)
- How to Read About Science (secularnewsdaily.com)
Patient treatment preferences ‘often misdiagnosed’
From the 8 November 2012 article at BBC Health
Doctors are failing to really listen to patients’ views on how they want to be treated, suggests a study in the British Medical Journal.
The Dartmouth College research says working out a patient’s preferences is as important as an accurate medical diagnosis.
Involving patients in discussions about treatment could cut the cost of healthcare around the world, they say.
Doctors should follow a three-step approach to engaging patients.
The BMJ analysis, written by three healthcare experts from the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science in New Hampshire, US, is based on a report written for the UK’s King’s Fund, a policy thinktank.
In it they argue that “preference misdiagnosis” – misinterpreting or ignoring the patient’s wishes – is a significant problem which is damaging to both doctors and patients.
The researchers say it can lead to, what they call, “silent” misdiagnoses – when doctors choose the wrong treatments because they fail to assess their patients’ preferences correctly.
These misdiagnoses are “silent” because they go largely unreported.
Priorities
While doctors are taught to concentrate on diagnosing the medical problem, the authors point to evidence which suggests doctors are not as good at setting out all the treatment options and finding out how the patient feels about them.
In one study they looked at, doctors believed that 71% of patients with breast cancer rate keeping their breast as a top priority, but the figure reported by patients was just 7%.
In another study of dementia, patients placed substantially less importance than doctors believed on the continuation of life with severely declining brain function.
Evidence also shows that patients often choose different treatments after they become better informed about the risks and benefits, say the authors….
….
“More than 100 years ago student doctors were told to ‘listen to the patient, he is telling you the diagnosis’.
“Today, the rise in treatment options makes this even more critical, not only to reach a correct medical diagnosis but also to understand fully patients’ preferences – and reduce the huge waste in time and money that comes from the delivery of services that patients often neither want nor need.”
Anna Dixon, director of policy at the King’s Fund, said the research supported the idea that patients should be helped to make decisions about their care.
“Not only does it find that this results in more appropriate treatment than currently achieved but, rather counter-intuitively, it results in dramatically lower intervention rates.”
Dr Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association said good medicine was about doctors using their knowledge and expertise to help patients make informed choices.
“Good decisions about treatment reflect both a patient’s preferences, and the relevant medical evidence. Doctors try to help patients express their preferences and are aware that these sometimes differ from those of the ‘average’ patient.
“Exploring how the patient’s preferences and values relate to the decision to be made requires a relationship of trust between patient and doctor.”
Related articles
- Patient wishes ‘not listened to’ (bbc.co.uk)
- Doctors often miss patients’ treatment preferences (cbc.ca)
- Patient preferences often ignored in treatment decisions, warn experts (eurekalert.org)
- Doctors Often Misinterpret Patients’ Wishes, Study Says (newsday.com)
- A third of patients say their GPs are so rushed they are worried they will be misdiagnosed (thisismoney.co.uk)
Key Trends in the Future of Medicine: E-Patients, Communication and Technology
English: Watson demoed by IBM employees. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
From the 25 October 2012 post at Blogroll
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Robots replacing doctors?
I’ve given hundreds of presentations and I teach at several universities about the use of social media in everyday medicine and I always highlight the importance of 1) doctor-patient relationship in person, and 2) good communication skills for doctors, but if I try to think ahead, I have to agree with Vinod Khosla that technology can replace 80% percent of the work of doctors.
Khosla believed that patients would be better off getting diagnosed by a machine than by doctors. Creating such a system was a simple problem to solve. Google’s development of a driverless smart car was “two orders of magnitude more complex” than providing the right diagnosis.
IBM’s Watson is just the perfect example here. They have been working closelywith oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York in order to see whether Watson could be used in the decision making processes of doctors regarding cancer treatments. Watson doesn’t answer medical questions, but based on the input data, it comes up with the most relevant and potential answers and the doctor has the final call. This is an important point as it can only facilitate the work of doctors, not replacing them…
..So what should we expect to see in the next decades? I think we will see amazing developments in many areas, except medicine in which small and slow steps will mark the way towards a more transparent healthcare system in which decision trees are available for everyone, online content and social media are both curated, patients are empowered, doctors are web-savvy, and collaborative barriers are gone forever. A new world in which medical students are trained to be able to deal with the rapidly evolving technologies and e-patients.
A great related graphic at http://envisioningtech.com/envisioning-the-future-of-health.pdf
(WordPress was not responding when an upload was attempted)
Related articles
- Vinod Khosla: Technology Will Replace 80 Percent of Docs (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
- Key Trends in the Future of Medicine: E-Patients, Communication and Technology (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
- IBM’s Watson Is Learning Its Way To Saving Lives (fastcompany.com)
- How Much is too Much and Who Decides? (finnpartners.com)
- “Third kind of computer” learns cancer medicine (computerworld.co.nz)
- Vinod Khosla Thinks I’m Narrow-Minded (thehealthcareblog.com)
- Topol says machines will be vital to healthcare transformation, new doc-patient partnership (medcitynews.com)
New Tech for Complex Micro Structures for Use in Sensors and Other Apps
From the 13 July 2012 article at Science News Daily
University of Maryland Chemistry Professor John Fourkas and his research group have developed new materials and nanofabrication techniques for building miniaturized versions of components needed for medical diagnostics, sensors and other applications. These miniaturized components — many impossible to make with conventional techniques — would allow for rapid analysis at lower cost and with small sample volumes.
Fourkas and his team have created materials that allow the simultaneous 3D manipulation of microscopic objects using optical tweezers and a unique point-by-point method for lithography (the process of using light in etching silicon or other substrates to create chips and other electronic components). As they report in a research article published in the August issue of Chemical Science , the combination of these techniques allows them to assemble complex 3D structures from multiple microscopic components.
This work builds on earlier breakthroughs by Fourkas and his team in the use of visible light for making tiny structures for applications such as optical communications, controlling cell behavior and manufacturing integrated circuits.
“These materials have opened the door to a suite of new techniques for micro and nanofabrication,” says Fourkas. “For instance, we have been able to perform braiding and weaving with threads that have a diameter that is more than 100 times smaller than that of a human hair.” In the paper, Fourkas and his group also showcase 3D structures composed of glass microspheres, a microscopic tetherball pole, and a microscopic needle eye that has been threaded….
Related articles
- Team creates new tech for complex micro structures for use in sensors, other apps (phys.org)
- UMD creates new tech for complex micro structures for use in sensors & other apps (eurekalert.org)
- Update on DARPA Tip based nanofabrication and nanoscale metamaterials (nextbigfuture.com)
- Nanotechnology Now – Press Release: “NanoInk to Exhibit and … (nanotech-now.com)
- Cutting the Cost of Micro- and Nanomanufacturing (nextbigfuture.com)
About
This blog presents a sampling of health and medical news and resources for all. Selected articles and resources will hopefully be of general interest but will also encourage further reading through posted references and other links. Currently I am focusing on public health, basic and applied research and very broadly on disease and healthy lifestyle topics.
Several times a month I will post items on international and global health issues. My Peace Corps Liberia experience (1980-81) has formed me as a global citizen in many ways and has challenged me to think of health and other topics in a more holistic manner.
Do you have an informational question in the health/medical area?
Email me at jmflahiff@yahoo.com
I will reply within 48 hours.
This blog is a companion site to my Health and Medical News and Resources Web site with…
- Great places to start (locating health information)
- Links to help from others (as health care providers and support groups)
- Interactive tools (as health calculators and apps)
- Select related news sites and blogs
My professional work experience and education includes over 15 years experience as a medical librarian and a Master’s in Library Science. In my most recent position I enjoyed contributing to our library’s blog, performing in depth literature searches, and collaborating with faculty, staff, students, and the general public.
While I will never be be able to keep up with the universe of current health/medical news, I subscribe to the following to glean entries for this blog.
- Science Daily – Your source for the latest research news
- MedlinePlus email updates from the US National Institutes of Health
- Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce – a collaboration of U.S. government agencies, public health organizations and health sciences libraries
- US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) news now with updates on the agency’s efforts to “improve the quality, safety, efficiency, and effectiveness of health care for all Americans”
- Research Buzz, “news about search engines, digital archives, online museums, databases, and other Internet information collections since 1998”
- Scout Report, a “weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators”
- KevinMD.com -“Social Media’s leading physician voice”
- EurekAlert-Medicine and Health
Health and Medical News and Resources 