This week I blogged on CNE about using cellphones for medical records.
The work done at the Quinn Lab is pretty fun: they turn cellphones into visualisation devices. While the medical applications are useful and impressive (and no doubt gives grant money) my bet is that interfacing with GIS might be even more of a killer app.
As soon as enough processing is in the phones the real bottleneck becomes the network and information access. A patient record system has to do authentification, privacy monitoring and ensure quality of service - not insurmountable, but making the basic system so flexible that it can be accessed using mobile devices might be tricky from both an architectural and legal standpoint. I'm worried that electronic health records may become so regulated that they can never be more than software pieces of paper.
Of course, as demonstrated by mp3 players and the iPod, sometimes alternative institutions develop outside of regulation and eventually forces a change.
Posted by Anders3 at April 4, 2007 04:01 PM