GEHealthcare
Latest
ICYMI: 7-D heart MRI, astronaut cups and tech tats
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-906391{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-906391, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-906391{width:570px;display:block;}try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-906391").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: NASA just shipped the astronauts on the International Space Station a cup that will let them almost drink like earthlings. GE announced scanning tech that would reveal the intricacies of the heart far quicker than conventional MRIs. And temporary tats that can monitor health and beam the information right to a doctor are here, coming to sick little people or elderly folks someday. If you've ever been woken up a couple times a night in a hospital, so a nurse could loudly check your vitals, you know what a win these could be.
Intel and GE form healthcare joint venture, sluggish Atom-powered home servants on the way
Okay, so maybe we're only half-kidding about the prospective of having home health robots that can barely multitask, but we're hoping that Intel and GE at least have the heart to equip any domicile servants with a Core i3 or stronger. If you haven't heard, the two aforesaid companies have joined hands this week to create a 50/50 joint venture, one that'll result in the creation of a new healthcare company "focused on telehealth and independent living." Financial terms aren't being disclosed, but the goal is pretty simple: "to use technology to bring more effective healthcare into millions of homes and to improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic conditions." It's a bit unclear at this point what all the duo will be creating, but we wouldn't be shocked to see medical tablets, Core i7 980X-based "medical monitoring PCs" and Moorestown-powered "I've fallen and I can't get up!" neck pieces surface in the near future.
White space networking could disrupt hospital telemetry systems
The stumbling blocks keep piling up as white space networking struggles to get off the ground: it looks like the manufacturers of healthcare equipment are set to join NAB in opposing the technology. Wireless medical telemetry devices like heart monitors have been operating in broadcast white spaces since the late 80s, and manufacturers like GE Healthcare say that the Microsoft- and Google-backed white space networking initiative could potentially "directly interfere" and "prevent patient monitoring." For its part, the FCC has set aside all of channel 37 for medical telemetry devices in 1998 after interference from a nearby TV station shut down the system at Baylor University Medical Center, but it wasn't mandatory, and hospitals that haven't made the switch could face millions of dollars in upgrade costs. That's not say that medical telemetry concerns are a problem that can't be solved -- the new Google push includes a channel 37 exception, for example, and there are some other compromise solutions on the table -- but it seems like there's no end of issues for a technology that hasn't really even been demonstrated working yet.
