I am back from my Thanksgiving trip to Dallas. Recently I have noticed two more things about my phone. With the cold weather up here in Cleveland, gloves make answering the phone or doing anything on the iPhone a pain. The touch screen does not work, so if you have to answer the phone, one hand will have to freeze. The maps with GPS feature is very helpful if you are in an unfamiliar city. It uses the cell towers and GPS to determine your current location and allows you to plug in destination information to create your route. It saved my mom and I from driving around in too many circles as the Dallas streets changed names repeatedly. This probably goes without saying, but DO NOT use this feature while currently behind the wheel and actually driving, let your passenger navigate or pull off into a parking lot. It is not a Garmin, but it is very helpful.

Now on to more uses for mobile phones in medicine.

According the Tuesday's O'Reilly Radar, as of November there were about 9,800 unique apps in the iPhone App Store, 22% were free, and the average price of a "Top 100" paid app fell to about $2.60. While gaming is still the largest category, the medical category is the newest and is growing. There are over 80 medical apps and the 10 most popular are free. While the medical applications category will always be smaller than the gaming category, there is some growth and it looks like more medical software producers are dipping their toes into the mobile phone area.


Here are some examples of what people are doing with mobile phones.

Medical Imaging - There have been several articles on radiology using iPods as a portable storage and viewing device. Well IBM and Merge Healthcare have decided to join together to provide a method to deliver medical images to an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Medical Student Education - Over the next two years, each Ohio State College of Medicine student will receive a standard iPod Touch, equipped with specific medical software programs planned by the OSU College of Medicine. Ok, the iPod Touch is a cell phone, so I am cheating a little bit, but I assume medical students who have iPhone would be able to get the same resources as their classmates who only have the Touch.

Drug Information - Lexi-Comp is available on BlackBerry, Window Mobile and iPhone. Epocrates and many other drug information resources are available on various smartphone platforms.

Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring -RS TechMedic BV just announced the release of their iPhone Telemedicine Application which allows physicians to monitor vital signs of ambulant and home care patients at any time from their phone. Patients are given a small device which transmits their vitals to a secure server. Physicians can connect to the server with their iPhone to monitor the vital signs. In Great Britain, mobile phones with special software can send patient health information to a hospital database to be analyzed by a nurse who will decide whether further action is needed. On the extreme end of telemedicine, one surgeon used his mobile phone and text messaging to learn how to perform a rare type of amputation on a teenager's arm in Congo, Africa, saving the boys life.

I am still keeping my eyes open to see how mobile phones effect medical libraries and I will post more that when I find more information.