Sunday, September 20, 2009

Introduction

I am a telecommunications human factors professional with 20 years of experience. I started my career at AT&T Bell Laboratories and have worked at and founded a variety of cutting-edge technology companies, small and large. My graduate education has been in cognitive psychology and computer science. My doctoral dissertation blended both psychology and artificial intelligence.

I has first introduced to human factors as a graduate research associate working on a project funded by Xerox’s Palo Alto research center (PARC). A tour of PARC started me down the road of a career in human factors.

As interesting as I found intelligent systems, I found telecommunications equally fascinating – although I have no formal training in the discipline. I learned telecommunications primarily on the job, in corporate classrooms and through library research.

I first became involved with telemedicine when I was the Chief Technologist of a cutting edge wireless communications start-up company, Rosetta-Wireless. We had applied for (and won) a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). We were proposing to build a system that could support client-server, telemedicine (among other applications) applications over any available wireless connection. One of our proposal reviewers was a well-known medical researcher from National Institutes of Health (NIH) who showed considerable interest in our technology. (I am not at liberty to disclose his name.) In case you were wondering, we were able to build that system. It works extremely well and has the extraordinary capabilities to support all types of client-server applications over constantly shifting and unreliable wireless communications conditions.

In this blog, I focus on the technical aspects of telemedicine including medical monitoring and remote programming. I became motivated to create this blog when I stumbled across US Patent #7,565,197, Conditional requirements for remote medical device programming, owned by Medtronics. For my first few blog entries, I shall analyze this patent and discuss what I think are its implications for the future of medicine.

No comments:

Post a Comment