Next Step
Abdul Basit
As per suggestions during the first Workshop, I would like to float my ideas, interests and a little about me (for new members). Moreover I would like to ask all the members who have the passion to help the humanity using their existing knowledge, experience, time, resources and energy to come forward and share their ideas and interests. This process will end up in the formation of naturally developed subgroups based on common interests and I hope that each subgroup will attract its university supervisors, industrial partners, healthcare professionals and the most energetic young talented students.
My Interests:
Telemedicine seems the only healthcare solution in future considering a variety of factors like economic conditions, scarcity of professionals, aging population and best utilization of technology. For this reason, Telemedicine is my main area of interest. But Saying just telemedicine is too general because Telemedicine range from performing a remote surgical operation using medical robots to as little as teaching a bunch of healthcare professional using a video conference. Therefore I need to go a little bit in depth.
I am interested in the middle band of telemedicine i.e., ;
(a). Where a healthcare professional like paramedical staff takes the necessary data of a patient sitting in a remote resource-poor environment and gets an expert's advise who can not or do not want to go in the remote area.
(b). Where a patient enter his data (manually or automatically) and get back informed reports from the system that can be used by his doctor, medicine manufacturing industry and for government policies.
If I focus my interests a bit more then I would end up saying that I like to use telemedicine for diabetes management. But it does not mean that I am not interested in managing / handling other diseases using telemedicine.
These methods can be used for managing individual diseases as well as for using the system for a community.
Working Directions:
Considering the above tasks, work can be done on two different solutions (according to my knowledge).
- By making a microcontroller based cheap embedded system where we can interface different medical devices and store the data on a server for browsing through a dynamic website.
- Second solution is a bit easy but more reliable because a great work is already being carried out in this direction by MIT guys and Dr Gari Clifford is one of the main pillars of this project. The idea is to use Google's Android based smart phone as the main platform to entre and retrieve patient's data and doctors' response respectively. I would like to promote the usage of the current available system so that improvements can be suggested and statistics of the 'Success' of Telemedicine could be documented. In long term I would like to work on adding peripheral devices to the 'Sana' Andriod based system.
These interests and working directions are showing only the big picture. When we will sit together we will break things into smaller blocks to make the project a success.
Now about me:
I am an Electronic Engineer by training, and recently completed, with distinction, an MSc in Medical Electronics and Physics at Queen Mary, University of London. Presently I am working as a Medical Engineer in Princess Royal University Hospital, Kent. My undergraduate project (awarded 'Best Project of 2006') was a telemedicine system; connecting ambulances with a hospital website through the latest GPRS communication technology. Emphasize was given to make the system user friendly in order to fulfil the needs of paramedical staff. I published this idea ‘Utilization of GPRS for telemedicine’ in 2005. For my MSc dissertation I worked in the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in Surrey. Here, I assessed ultrasound imaging techniques for cancer treatment, with a focus on developing and testing a novel technique for finding and characterizing the focal point of a focused ultrasound transducer. The main problem of interference was intelligently solved with a conceptual model of new ultrasonic imaging techniques. In addition, I won a robotic competition where I was involved in designing and fabricating a robot for extinguishing candles. This project provided me with excellent experience in developing fast algorithms and mechanical robotic bodies, considering variables such as the best possible positions of light and touch sensors, fast movement and sharp turning angles.
My current work as a Medical Engineer in NHS environment is an excellent resource to learn the cutting edge medical technology and to develop enthusiasm for designing their equivalents for the other part of the World.
Its all about me, so what about You? :)
Regards
Basit