TECH TALK
from differing devices) to provide doctors on the ground with more information ASAP, rather than rely on possibly undertrained people to provide vital information in an emergency.
Figure 2: KardiaMobile (image from AliveCor)
platform to help clinicians manage patients for the early detection of atrial fibrillation, the most common cardiac arrhythmia and one that leads to five times higher risk of stroke. KardiaBand is the first FDA- cleared medical device accessory for Apple Watch. The new KardiaPro platform is the only Remote Patient Monitoring platform that works with the existing devices that patients use. Their KardiaBand was an ‘add-on’
product that worked with the Apple Watch 1 thru 3, and now it appears that Apple is trying to compete with them by integrating in many of their capabilities into the Watch 4. This product also works on Android devices, so it will be interesting to see if Google, Samsung, and others take a similar approach to Apple, or, integrate with AliveCor’s designs. Why we highlight this company for this article is simply to show how quickly portable medical monitoring devices are expanding to become affordable, dependable, and one day, be ubiquitous.
Integration with Electronic Health Care Records
This will be the holy grail. For emergency medical devices on aircraft (and other non-medical facility locations) to be of higher value for people who suffer an emergency is to have some manner of access to or integration with that person’s medical history, which may drive a caregiver to take more appropriate action. They are an entire slew of legal and
privacy regulations and policy which need to be defined before any of this can happen (integration of someone’s medical history with a medical event), but, this is precisely where we are headed. With the expansion of air travel, and longer flights reaching around the world, the need to better address medical emergencies and possibly manage flight diversions will only grow. This means that not only do operators need to add more medical diagnostic devices, but these need to have communications capabilities (and manage data formats
Airlines and operators will also need to work with IFE/ communications providers to perhaps integrate with devices such as smartwatches and AliveCor-type products to send their gathered data to a doctor, to potentially save a life. The logistics of this will be a challenge, but, if Panasonic and other such providers work with Apple and Google (to handle iOS and Android systems), this is quite achievable. It will help that if airlines and operators are able to convince their passengers to populate their personal medical histories onto their smartphones in the event that this information may save their lives. A good start would be for anyone who registers with an airline that they do have a medical condition or are pregnant, they could either voluntarily grant access to their online medical data or their smartphone / tablet app which may have this.
As an example of this, my doctor’s
office group supports the export of my data to Microsoft HealthVault (which is closing this year, Microsoft is adding new health-record integration capabilities to Azure instead), and Apple is moving into the space, and is working with a growing list of healthcare institutions to support health records on its iPhone platform, enabling access to data such as immunizations, lab results, treatments, medications, and vitals directly in their Health app. Google Cloud’s Healthcare API serves as an engine for interoperability and can accelerate the ingestion, storage, and integration of key healthcare data types. Assuredly other data providers,
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DOMmagazine.com | july 2019
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