New iPhone Announced
The new Apple iPhone was announced today at the WWDC keynote address along with the 3.0 release of the iPhone OS. The hardware has a few new bells and whistles, but mostly tacks on to the iPhone 3G’s success, hence the new name 3GS. The S is for Speed…or Speedier.
What is a little more relevant for this blog is the new iPhone 3.0 software which was announced a few months ago and also featured during the keynote. One of the the areas in which Apple is trying to grow the iPhone is in health care. Airstrip Critical Care is an application that allows medical professional access to patient information in and outside of the hospital. During the presentation, the results of a Chem 7 were shown along with a notification of an abnormal result (I can’t tell if this is a push from outside the app or not). There was also a display of patient vitals with the ability to pause and zoom in on the ECG to look at anything abnormal. This sort of technology isn’t that new within the OS (except the push notification), but looks like a big push with integration to medical IT solutions which would give access to the device.
In addition to this the 3.0 software also has the ability for software to access external hardware accessories. There were a couple of weird demos with science experiments and a guitar. However, there are also companies like LifeScan (a Johnson & Johnson company) who are building applications which can integrate with a new line of OneTouch blood glucose monitors. The integration would allow for easier collection of blood glucose level data and is being paired with other functionality like calculating insulin doses based on the current glucose level and carb intake from a meal.
Apple is looking to gain a pretty big foothold in the medical community among other areas. There are obviously some issues here that need to be considered like patient privacy and data security. There is also a much bigger investment involved that putting an iPhone in the hand of everyone in the hospital. At the same time, I’ve heard more than one comparison to the tri-quarter…
