Medical Records on Your Cell Phone

Reported March 2006

SAN DIEGO (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Imagine if your medical records were lost or misplaced. It can cause more than aggravation; it could impact the care you receive. Now, imagine being able to download your own health records -- even X-rays and diagnostic scans -- right into your cell phone or PDA.

The same technology that brings games to life in your cell phone can also help you and your doctor keep track of your health. Gregory Quinn, Ph.D., a computer scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, says, "We can do quite amazing things in terms of presenting information."

Many of the newer cells phones and PDAs have a graphics chip like the one in your PC. The chip can turn your phone into a virtual medical library, complete with stunning 3-D computer graphics and medical scans.

Quinn is developing a program that will allow doctors to view a patient's medical history on mobile devices.

Cardiologist Michael Wright, M.D., believes mobile medical records will not only help doctors, it will simplify things for patients. Dr. Wright, a cardiologist and the medical director at the LifeScore Clinic in San Diego says: "Right now your medical records are scattered here and there. You don't really have easy access to them."

With Quinn's program, medical notes and patient tests can be downloaded onto a cell phone in just minutes. "Let's say, for example, I had done a scan here and had picked up a narrowed blood vessel coming down the surface of the heart. That would be visible on this 3-D model," Dr. Wright says.

All the data on a phone is stored in the memory expansion slot. In these medical phones, however, Instead of music and digital pictures, it could hold a virtual scan of the body and much more. "It really does provide a, an on going, growing medical record that they can always have with them," Dr. Wright tells Ivanhoe.

The 3-D mobile medical data program should be available within a year. Quinn's program isn't limited to medical information. He says students will be able to retrieve science and other information on their cell phones during class.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Greg Quinn, Ph.D., Principal Investigator
Mobile Data Visualization Group
San Diego Supercomputer Center
La Jolla, CA 92093
Phone: (858) 534 8399
quinn@sdsc.edu

For more about engineering, contact:

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc
IEEE-USA
1828 L Street, N.W., Suite 1202
Washington, D.C. 20036-5104
Tel: +1 202 785 0017
ieeeusa@ieee.org
http://www.ieee.org

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