This article, published by the Department of Anesthesiology, University at Stony Brook on Long Island tackles a problem I’ve mentioned before. Doctors still use pagers as their primary alerting and communication system, and cellular phones are not allowed to be turned on inside most institutions.

I believe there is a great communication enhancement waiting to be tapped here. Imagine not only a patient code being pushed to a physician, but medical images, patient history, charts… There’s so much data that exists in digital form now that can be used when a doctor is away from the patient to make faster, better judgments. It just seems so obvious, allowing physicians to access varying levels of detail starting from the basic thing they get on their pagers now:

- beep

[look at phone]

- see patient code

[click chart]

- see history and current condition

[click images]

- browse all DICOM image sets for the patient

That said, though this article states “small risks of electromagnetic interference between mobile telephones and medical devices,” and I want to be optimistic - the fact that I can hear the RF interference from my phone on any headphone or stereo system does make me skeptical of the safety. We really need to characterize the risk.

Anyway, here’s the abstract:

“Most hospital policies prohibiting the use of wireless devices cite reports of disruption of medical equipment by cellular telephones. There have been no studies to determine whether mobile telephones may have a beneficial impact on safety. At the 2003 meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists 7878 surveys were distributed to attendees.

The five-question survey polled anesthesiologists regarding modes of communication used in the operating room/intensive care unit and experience with communications delays and medical errors. Survey reliability was verified using test-retest analysis and proportion agreement in a convenience sample of 17 anesthesiologists. Four-thousand-eighteen responses were received. The test-retest reliability of the survey instrument was excellent (Kappa = 0.75; 95% confidence interval, 0.56-0.94). Sixty-five percent of surveyed anesthesiologists reported using pagers as their primary mode of communications, whereas only 17% used cellular telephones. Forty-five percent of respondents who use pagers reported delays in communications compared with 31% of cellular telephone users. Cellular telephone use by anesthesiologists is associated with a reduction in the risk of medical error or injury resulting from communication delay (relative risk = 0.78; 95% confidence interval, 0.6234-0.9649).

The small risks of electromagnetic interference between mobile telephones and medical devices should be weighed against the potential benefits of improved communication.”

Coincidentally, Stony Brook is ranked high on my wife’s list of residency programs. She could end up there this summer. I’d like to see if they begin to integrate mobile phone usage hospital wide.

Update: My alma mater recently published a study on the interference of cell phones with airplane equipment. You can see the article here. GPS equipment is cited as vulnerable. Therefore, my guess is that the interference threat in hospitals is real also.

So this problem isn’t going to be wished away - if we want to reap the benefits, we need to work out the true danger and how to mitigate it.

Yep, you’ve just officially heard the sound of Sun dropping the ball.

From Newswire:

“Leading companies in the wireless and mobile gaming value chain have joined forces to define and support an open gaming architecture for premium-quality native games for mobile phones.

The combined efforts between Activision, Inc. ; Digital Chocolate; Electronic Arts (EA); Ideaworks3D; Konami ; Microsoft Corp.; MontaVista Software; Nokia ; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; SK Telecom; Square Enix; Symbian Limited; Tao Group; and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) will aim to streamline the process of developing and delivering games for a range of mobile environments, resulting in reduced platform fragmentation, lowered development costs, and a richer gaming experience for the consumer.”

These people want to quickly develop sophisticated cross-platform games. Can you blame them? When your sales are directly proportional to the amount of devices you support, J2ME becomes a roadblock, not a vehicle.

I’m excited. Finally a development platform designed by developers annoyed at the current tools. It should be amazing.

This will finally let mobile game designers start stretching their muscles - to really attempt to take a bite out of the PSP and DS market. I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for the specifics.

MocoNews reports today that members of the GSM Associated have signed a letter of intent that “agreed to the GSM Association principle that IM will be a paid service on mobile phones, but users will only need to pay to send, not to receive, messages.” (via Red Herring article)

I’m not sure how legally binding it is when the members of the GSM Associate sign a “letter of intent”, but I’ll tell you want it feels like: collusion. This is how monopolies behave! The GSM Association would be better off just concentrating on interoperability agreements without limiting a growing market place. There are other business models out there folks.

On 03/15/2005, Verizon issued a press release stating:

“Given the tremendous success and momentum of 1xEV-DO, Nortel has embarked on an aggressive program to deliver 1xEV-DO Rev A,” said Richard Lowe, president, CDMA, Nortel. “Nortel’s DO Rev A technology will allow operators to serve more customers on the same spectrum while delivering VoIP and other advanced multimedia services that enhance the end user’s experience and increase subscriber loyalty.”

The DO Rev A technology delivers peak data rate bursts up to 3.1 Mbps (megabits per second) on the forward link and up to 1.8 Mbps on the reverse link. DO Rev A operates in the 1.25 MHz channel and is optimized for packet data service that provides one of the lowest costs per bit when compared to other cellular technologies…

“DO Revision A is the logical next step for us to consider as we pursue our goal to migrate our 1xEV-DO 3G network to deliver the latest applications and services to our customers,” said Ed Salas, vice president of network planning, Verizon Wireless. “EV-DO Rev A fits in with our mantra of providing our business and individual customers superior voice and data networks in the U.S.”

Nortel is planning live market trials with Verizon Wireless beginning in 2006…”

You can find the release here.

Has anyone heard anything new about this? If they adhere to their press release, there should be some tests going on now.

3.1 down and 1.8 up? Are we in Tokyo or something?

Friday night, I moved Mobilitee to a new server and upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.1. This went surprisingly well - to the point of paranoia that I missed something. So please let me know if you see something amiss.

As a note for you blogging geeks out there- this was the first time I moved a Wordpress database. Both the source and target hosts used phpmyadmin, so it should have been as easy as an export from one and an import to the other. However, the new host claimed the SQL in the dump file was invalid when I tried to read it in from a file.

So I had to cut and paste the SQL from the dump file into the dialog window bit by bit. Very annoying. The most annoying part is that when I was done, I realized about 80% of what I copied was spam blacklists and filtered spam comments. Sad sad sad…

Update: Yeah I new it couldn’t be that easy. The cut and paste move I pulled caused all UTF and anything requiring an HTML escape code to turn into invalid characters. I had to go through all the posts and edit them manually. Remind me not to do that again.

There’s been a lot of press about the Opera Mini browser lately — and most of it very positive. Now as the hype is hitting a steady hum, I thought I’d chime in with some thoughts — my user experience and how it is going to change me. It is common to hear about how people change their behavior to meet technology — you ask for some functionality in an application or from a device and what you get is something far less than what you expected, or wanted — so you change, you deal.

I haven’t been as aggressive as Rich in searching for the best device, but ever since I left Japan two years ago, I’ve been looking for a device that I can really browse on — even if the formatting is challenged — and check my email on. I never looked hard for a high-end device, nor did I try and find the best device (didn’t want to pay too much).

I feel like I’ve been changing my behavior on my previous phones: the Motorola V600 and a short stint on a Sony Ericsson. I had to use Bloomberg WAP site on both those phones to get news about markets, and I couldn’t check email easily, nor could I ever hope to open a website like Amazon. Then I started using a RAZR — I love the form factor most of all, and I don’t drop it as much as my previous phones. Feeling cool was good, but I was still feeling limited. The RAZR had the same UI and ancient Motorola OS that my V600 had — I had the same limited range of browsing options, but then I installed the Opera Mini browser…

Now, finally I’m going to use data on my mobile — and you know what? As the word of mouth spreads, so are many more people. I find myself filling my free time with data usage — I feel like being an evangelist for a mobile app. I want my friends and family to know how great it is.

Here’s how I’ve used it: I was in Barnes and Noble last weekend and I checked my Amazon WishList, then I checked my recent order status. I was in France over Christmas I used Opera Mini to check my email for work, to check my personal email, to read the newspaper, to look up words as I read some political editorial in Le Figaro on the metro. Now when I go stand in a line at In and Out Burgers near LAX, I can check my Bloglines feeds (despite a occasional out of memory error, it still shows what it can without crashing). Finally I’m catching up with my former mobile self still stuck in Japan in late 2003/2004.

This is all good news! Apps like this, outside of carrier and even manufacturer’s standard offerings, are going to open up the possibilities for mobile applications, for the mobile marketplace and awareness in general. This is the beginning.

A little phone comparison for ya.

When I first started with Verizon, I opted for the Treo 700w. Being high on the thrill of EvDO and the great form factor the Treo offers, it was easy to overlook its major flaw: low available program memory. Since I was still in my 14 day trade-in period with Verizon, this led me to the VX6700.

If you browse any of the major forums for a bit (check out the Verizon PDA forum at Howardforums, for example), you’ll see hot and heated debate on just what this lack of memory means to the user.

Let me say this. The consensus is right - if you are a non power-user the device works as advertised. You can browse the web and stream a media file at the same time. You can keep a few programs running and still have decent response. All the expected things.

The deal-breaker for me was Bloglines. I’ve got some serious feeds, and I don’t get around to reading them all the time. In fact, a lot of the time I catch up on them all is when I’m mobile. Since these feeds can grow quite long, PIE totally chokes with its lack of RAM and the whole device goes into seizure. I mean serious seizure - reboot time.

Since I switched, I discovered a great Windows Mobile program out there called Egress. Two cool things about it:

• It caches your feeds to storage card and loads articles one by one
• It syncs with Bloglines

That last one is critical. I don’t want to deal with re-reading posts. Now be careful - what I mean by syncing to Bloglines is that each time you grab your feeds in Egress, it pulls all new posts as Bloglines sees them, and clears the unread numbers in Bloglines. It does NOT sync with Bloglines on a post-by-post basis. So if you tell it to update, be ready for Bloglines to reset to zero unread.

The fact that Egress caches to memory card would have probably solved my Bloglines memory issue on the Treo. If anyone has this device, please give it a try and let me know how it goes.

So could my abandoning of the Treo have been prevented if I had discovered Egress earlier? Maybe, maybe not. There were a few other issues as well.

The keyboard on the Treo is ok for email, terrible for IM. My office is virtual. IM is critical. On the Treo, my intense IM needs caused my hands to cramp on the small keyboard. It is great to have that keyboard always exposed - so that you don’t have to slide it out or flip around a screen. But the tradeoff was too much for me. Though the VX keyboard isn’t perfect, it is certainly spacious, and I can pound away at it for a much longer time.

Yes EvDO is fast. But a lot of my RSS reading is done in my house away from my computer. How much better is a WiFi experience? Since the Treo is EvDO only and the VX6700 has WiFi, that temptation was too much. Turns out, the WiFi experience is a LOT better, as expected.

Treo’s Square screen. No, it’s actually not a big deal. But now that I have those extra pixels I realized I missed them.

Build quality concerns. Some forum posts talk about trading off the Treo build quality for the VX. I’m not too sure about that. This thing is solid. Yes, the sliding keyboard is probably the achilles heel. But overall I am very pleased with the weight and solid feel to the device.

Bluetooth headset. Oh man did this anger me. For the life of me, I could not get the Treo to open the connection to an already-paired Jabra headset while a call was in progress. I kept selecting “turn handsfree on”.. Nothing. On the VX, I was good to go. Worked as advertised. Oh and I could also get the BT headset working with Skype on the VX and not on the Treo.

That said, I’d like to place my vote in the hat for the general suckiness of Bluetooth. I use it all the time, and I curse it all the time.

Crashprone? I’d rate them equal on that if you stay away from memory-hungry programs. However the Treo chokes hard when it runs out of RAM.

VX is $100 cheaper. Yes, this was offset by the $50 Mini-SD card I had to buy, but still.

So there you go. Both devices are good choices. Really. But for the power-user, you’d be missing out if you don’t at least take a hard look at the VX6700.