This paper summarizes the panel discussion at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Point-of-Care Healthcare Technology Conference (POCHT 2013) held in Bangalore India from Jan 16–18, 2013. Modern medicine has witnessed interdisciplinary technology innovations in healthcare with a continuous growth in life expectancy across the globe. However, there is also a growing global concern on the affordability of rapidly rising healthcare costs. To provide quality healthcare at reasonable costs, there has to be a convergence of preventive, personalized, and precision medicine with the help of technology innovations across the entire spectrum of point-of-care (POC) to critical care at hospitals. The first IEEE EMBS Special Topic POCHT conference held in Bangalore, India provided an international forum with clinicians, healthcare providers, industry experts, innovators, researchers, and students to define clinical needs and technology solutions toward commercialization and translation to clinical applications across different environments and infrastructures. This paper presents a summary of discussions that took place during the keynote presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions on needs, challenges, and technology innovations in POC technologies toward improving global healthcare. Also presented is an overview of challenges and trends in developing and developed economies with respect to priority clinical needs, technology innovations in medical devices, translational engineering, information and communication technologies, infrastructure support, and patient and clinician acceptance of POC healthcare technologies.
In recent years, there has been intensified development of cost-effective alternatives to conventional force plates, such as those of Kistler and AMTI, in clinical and scientific research. To our knowledge, the evidence for existing validity and reliability of the HUMAC Balance System has so far been lacking. Over the course of the study, the HUMAC Balance System, which is based on the WII Balance Board technology, was tested. 26 HUMAC Balance Systems in conjunction with 2 force plates, each from the manufacturers Kistler and AMTI, were examined and their properties under static and dynamic conditions were evaluated. Under static conditions, the HUMAC Balance System revealed a relatively constant and comparatively small margin of displacement error. However, tests of the force plates under dynamic conditions revealed contrasting results. The conventional force plates, with a margin of error of 2.5%, proved to have a smaller margin of error compared to the HUMAC Balance System, which had margins of error of 8.6% and 6.1% in x and y directions, respectively. A calibration method was developed to overcome these systematic deviations. After applying the calibration, the Balance Board margin of error was reduced to an acceptable maximum of 0.18%.
Investigating the influence of the implementation of SwissDRG in 2012 regarding LOS patients' outcome and satisfaction, we found no significant changes. However, we observed some noteworthy trends, which should be monitored closely.
ALTHOUGH Hauge (1) and other European investigators (f, 3) have established Bacalus cereus as an etiological agent of food poisoning outbreaks for over a decade, there have been few well-documented reports of the association of B. cereus with food poisoning in the United States (4,6). B. cereus causes a form of food poisoning characterized by diarrhea, abdominal pain, and nausea with little or no vomiting. Symptoms usually occur 8-16 hours after ingestion of the contaminated food. Hauge (1) found B. cereus to be the etiological agent in eight instances of food poisoning involving foods such as vanilla sauce, cream sauce with egg, instant meat gravy prepared from a powder, and meat preserved in gravy. Experimentally, he was able to reproduce the symptoms in himself and in four of six volunteers, each of whom had consumed 155-270 ml. of vanilla sauce containing 30-60 million B. cereu per ml. The mechanism responsible for inducing the disease has not been conclusively demonstrated. In common with outbreaks caused by Clostridium per/ringens, those caused by B. cereuqs appear to require millions of living bacteria per gram of food to cause symptoms (1,6).
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