Video Gallery

Video: French TV report on an exhibition featuring a number of robots with a focus on older people at home, with a cameo appearance from Kompaï. Des robots multiservices pour les seniors. After the adverts.

The European Information Technology for European Advancement's (ITEA) Multimodal Interfaces for Disabled and Ageing Society (MIDAS) project has completed and the 15 partner companies have produced a 4 minute video of their final get-together that gives a flavour of the sub-projects covered.

Electronics company IMEC and the Dutch government supported Holst Centre have demonstrated a new low power health monitoring chip with the latest Bluetooth capability which, it is claimed, can last a month on a 200 mAh battery. The chip is capable of taking ECG, heart rate and motion detection and transmitting the data to a mobile phone. Applications include epileptic seizure detection and heart arrythmia monitoring. Heads up thanks to TANN: England editor Chrys Meewella.

Uploaded a few minutes ago - you see it first here, folks - our friends at Robosoft have come up with a robotised walker (still in its very early stages). Being stable and not bumping into things look like great advantages.

Two-minute video of telehealth monitoring of infants after surgery for complex congenital heart defects - an explanation by Dr. Bradley Keller, Kosair Charities Endowed Chair and Director of Pediatric Heart Research at the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute, University of Louisville, Kentucky, US.

Jamie Cole of UK-based Telecare Technology is quizzed in the video below on the economics, opportunities and risks of the automated 'we call you' phone system that his company provides. The approach is the logical extension of the type of services common in the US - often called 'telecare' - where volunteers on a rota phone people to check that they are alright. FineThanx runs a similar automated system in the US.

There are clearly opportunities in such systems to deliver, say, medication prompts at lower cost than sending a person to check, although an automated telecare medication dispenser may give more assurance that the person has actually complied. However, what is never mentioned by proponents of such 'we call you' systems is that by tethering the recipients to their homes while waiting for the call (because if there is no answer the planned escalating response kicks in) they essentially run counter to the ethos of promoting independence. Only one automated system that this editor (Steve) is aware of avoids this issue with a simple system for allowing the user to initiate the call to tell the system that they are alright, and that's the UK-based Alertacall.

New video from Robosoft shows additional fall detection and location functionality being added to the Kompaï care robot via the Multimodal Interfaces for Disabled and Aging Society (MIDAS) project.

Editor Steve confesses to mixed feelings about this video. As a communication to customers or potential customers of the independent Worcestershire TeleCare Service, it is excellent: the structure, the pace, and most importantly, the 'meet the team' interviews are spot-on. On the other hand it reminds one how much of the UK's telecare provision promotes the 'stay-at-home-with-a-pendant' mentality. It also looks like an advert for a particular manufacturer. Worcestershire TeleCare Service website. 7 mins 41 seconds

20 minute video of a talk by Dr David Albert with 'marketing' lessons for all who want their good idea to go viral: summarised at about minute 19. And if you want to learn more about the device and to see it in action, try this 5 minute YouTube: iphone ekg in action. Heads-up thanks to David Doherty of 3GDoctor.

Fox (Detroit) does a nice piece on using the Lok8u device, distributed by LifeProtekt in the US, with a child with autism, emphasising the reduced stress for her parents. [Video may start with unrelated advert.]

Making the case that mobile phones are the way that people in Africa access the internet, is this 3¼ minute video presentation from the South African Praekelt Foundation. The answer to "...and now?" is in the video, of course! Hmm...

And how will people power their phones in the future? Dirt! According to this Gizmag item: Mobile phones in developing nations could charge up using dirt.

30 minute presentation by Sarah Delaney, of the Work Research Centre, delivered to the Technology and Dementia Seminar, School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin in November 2010 - but just posted by the University on YouTube - about the results of the Alzheimer's Society's survey of carers. Telecare Project Interim Evaluation Results.

Content: 10/10. Unmissable if you are interested in telecare with people with dementia, especially the 'Food for Thought' section starting around 20 mins. General non-UK readers will be interested too in the definition of 'telecare' around the 2 min mark.
Presentation: 1/10. Well organised and good to listen to, but the bullet-ridden, text-heavy slides are the kind that have (unfairly) got PowerPoint its bad reputation.

This 17 minute video will leave you in no doubt why no one has better patient-empowerment credentials than Dave deBronkart, known as e-Patient Dave online. Dave presenting at TEDxMaastricht.

This 4 minute video by the NHS Alliance describes the use of telehealth monitoring in North Somerset. It appears to have been made in November 2010 and is on YouTube but does not seem to be published in context anywhere, even on the websites of the NHS Alliance or of the North Somerset PCT.

The University of Kansas's student newspaper The University Daily Kansan carries an interview with Jim Juola, one of their professors, who is working on the European Comission's project is called K-SERA: Knowledgable Service Robots for the Aging. Professor helps develop robot to help the elderly. There's a neat comment by someone who says they would rather be cared for by a real robot than by a human taught to behave like one. The project is using the diminutive (60cm) NAO robots from French company Aldebaran, as seen in the following 3 minute video.

Eric Topol is a consultant cardiologist in the US and an 'evangelist' for mobile phone-based remote patient monitoring. This 17 minute video of him speaking at TEDMED illustrating current technologies and trends was released back in February 2010, but just come to our attention. Watch the video on TED site so you can see, and possibly add to, the comments. Eric Topol's blog.

8½ minutes over 5 videos

Following a presentation at the Beyond 2010 conference 23 October, Dave Tyas, Service Improvement Manager for Self Care and Long Term Conditions for the NHS in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles is interviewed on videos posted to YouTube about the Whole Systems Demonstrator (WSD) programme there. The interview is broken into 5 short videos covering...

Researchers at MIT aim to push down the cost barrier on mirror-based health monitoring technology, as described in this video.

More details to this pointer to the future on the Gizmag site.

In contrast with the Camden short pendant-orientated video [below on Videos Page], Dudley Telecare Service's 8 minute video is excellent for the philosophy it embodies, the range of devices it covers (including Just Checking's equipment), and the number of down-to-earth testimonials from users of the service. Excellent soundbites from Linda Sanders, Director of Adult, Community and Housing Services too, especially at the 7:13 spot.

Camden is a council in North London with a population of 236,000. I hear that Camden has done good things on the telecare front...so why does their new one-minute advert for the telecare service concentrate on pendant alarms? Ah, the mysteries of councils' marketing and communications departments!

Not telecare, but this will interest a lot of Telecare Aware readers. RSLSteeper, a well-respected UK company in the assistive technology arena has started to show off its new, sensitive 'bionic' hand. BeBionic website. [It's a pity the site does not render well in Firefox browser.]

In the video below, see the visitor to an exhibition last month use the hand for the first time... and tie his shoelace. (About 3 mins in.)

If there's one thing I'd recommend all Telecare Aware readers to do this week it's to set aside 13 minutes to watch a video from the UK's Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE - pronounced 'sky'). It's not just because SCIE is one of those institutions set up by the previous Government which may not survive changes that will be brought in by the new one, but because the video, entitled Telecare - The ethical debate is excellent. [Note, it autoplays.]

There is an element of 'looking at both sides' to it, but the real value, as with the previously mentioned case studies from Newham, is in seeing how the telecare services are being used sensitively in the UK to support people who in previous generations would have been in institutions where everything was done for, and to, them.

If you have a further 10 minutes to watch another video, Telecare - providing more personalised care can be accessed from the Related Videos tab, to the bottom right of the above page. It puts telecare technologies into the general context of assistive technology for older and disabled people. (Readers from the USA will, no doubt, wince when they hear the technologies being referred to as AT&T.)

There is accompanying text and other materials on the SCIE video web page and, linked to the SCIE material, is an article in Community Care this week, Ethical issues in the use of telecare.

2 minutes 40 seconds

Telehealth guru Harry Wang, of Parks Associates, does an off-the-cuff interview at the Broadband Properties Summit 28 April 2010.

8 minutes

Good YouTube videos are hard to make. They should be informative, good-natured and, if not out-and-out funny, unintentionally amusing. This one, by Pittsburgh-based Secure Telehealth hits the spot.

IALC: The Telecare and Telehealth Market. 10 minutes

Excerpt of Dr Kevin Doughty speaking at the Independent Assistive Living Conference. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, he reflects on timescales, the difficulty of using people to solve care delivery problems, and house design. "The window of opportunity is forever."

16 minutes
"It would be a step backwards to work without telehealth now" says one of the nurses in this excellent overview of telehealth as it implemented now, in the Hebrides islands off the north west coast of Scotland. (Also has a passing reference to telehealth in Sheffield - not in the Hebrides) Nice work by the video's maker, Ged Yeates.

17 minutes

Eric Dishman gave an impassioned presentation at TEDMED in November 2009 but the video has just been released. He focuses on the need to bring much of healthcare out of the hospital and into the home by illustrating the research that Intel has been doing for the past 10 years. The video is an informative - and possibly inspiring - 16 minutes, after which you might want to go to the TEDMED site and scroll down to read the comments. Some are pertinent, some miss the point and at least one is decidedly cranky. They are a useful reminder of what we are up against.

Essentially the same presentation as his week-earlier keynote at last October's Connected Health Symposium (see this editor's report here), but you can now see this important presentation for yourself:  from ePatient Connections, Jason Hwang, M.D. on disruptive innovations in healthcare decentralizing care, and the historical futility of cramming new technology into old business models.  Dr. Hwang is Executive Director of the Innosight Institute and co-author of The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, with Professor Clayton M. Christensen and the late Jerome H. Grossman.  Thanks to Paul Sonnier of CommNexus (San Diego) for bringing this to our attention (and Kru Research for posting on their site).

You can buy the book (GBP £):

You can buy the book (USD $):

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

For your weekend viewing:
1) RTT News interviews Jonathan Linkous of the American Telemedicine Association on how technology and healthcare are converging (4 mins)
2) Larry Chu interviews Chuck Parker, Executive Director of Continua about the alliance, for HCPlive. (7 mins)
3) Tech journo Scott Mace visits the Continua Alliance booth at CES last week--the 'child's garden of wonders' we referred to. The video quality is only fair, but Mr Mace lets the demos speak for themselves. You'll also get an idea of the Digital Health part of the expo floor. This one includes IBM demonstrating the 'end-to-end' solution including A&D, Roche, Eurotech; Nonin Medical and Vignet. (7 mins)
4) Also by Scott Mace, this features Tunstall, Storento (sp?) med monitoring packaging, MedApps and a chronic disease management demo by a Continua representative that includes A&D, LNI Health Link uploading to a Google Health PNR. (10 mins)
5) A crystal clear MedApps demo using a pulse oximetry reading (the subject lived.) (1 min)

Length: Unknown

LocalGovTV interviews James Ferguson, clinical lead at the SCT who, according to the publicity, "discusses how a nationwide hi-tech drive is enabling people to communicate with consultants remotely to prevent hospitalization and support carbon reduction targets...Scottish residents can now benefit from video-conferencing and photo assessments to streamline access to healthcare wherever they are located...Mr Ferguson also addresses how to overcome barriers to adopting this technology so that other trusts and local authoritites can realise the enormous benefits."

The catch is that to view the video you have to give up contact information that will be used for marketing by the video's unnamed sponsor - and there is no privacy policy on the site which spells out just what else LocalGovTV will or will not do with that information. http://www.localgov.tv/JamesFerguson

20 minutes: Health 2.0 Conference

This video is over a year old and was posted as a lead-in to this year's Health 2.0 conference. I hope they leave it online because he has some important messages for health services and telehealth/telecare providers that care to listen. It's a thought-provoking 20 minutes. Get coffee and a pen and paper to jot down your responses - then post them here. Clay Shirky Health 2.0 2008 keynote speech video.

5 mins 20 seconds: Medgadget

Not remote patient monitoring, but activity monitoring for wider health/fitness purposes. Interesting marketing tagline: Every Movement Counts.

Five videos (approx 15 mins total viewing) Sinclair School of Nursing, University of Missouri, Columbia

'Terrible' web page, but links to interesting videos at the bottom - persevere if they do not play easily. [The first seems particularly problematic, and complain to the site, not me, if they do not work for you!]. The 'magic carpet' will interest most Telecare Aware readers. Aging in place.

3 mins: Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect at Home - Strengthening Relationships

Given that this is the way most of the public would expect an electronic health record to work, including this video should be unremarkable. However, that patients can access it themselves and communicate about it with their physicians via their home internet is a step forward. This community, of course, would be looking for it to be possible to upload remote health monitoring data too. And, if you are anticipating that the interviewed patient will say that her doctor 'is there for her', you won't be disappointed.

Related videos available here. [Heads-up thanks to Bob Pyke.]

4 minutes 49 seconds. Cambridge Consultants

'Cool video' in that bouncy YouTube way, BUT a pointer to the near future that you need to watch, nonetheless. It's light years from the time when pendant technology was cutting edge.

9 minuites. US Department of Veterans Affairs

Excellent video showing three examples of health delivery at a distance and its benefits to patients and staff. After watching, you may want to read an article about the telehealth facility at Craig, which gives some more information and a nursing perspective.

5 minuites. UTS Health

The following website is an interesting concept that points to a possible future for user-controlled health information.

Set up by UTS Health, a subsidiary of software company Indigo Byte Systems (UTS = Universal Tracking System), the site is a combination of user networking/health information sharing/mutual support and health information provided by the company, and a place to track your health monitoring data (privately, if you wish). The best way to grasp it before visiting the UTS website is to view their introductory video:

3 mins 31 secs. Zenda Technologies Startup

Zenda Technologies (www.zendatech.com) has developed a headset technology that allows primary care physicians to diagnose Alzheimer's within 10 minutes, instead of the one-hour paper-based test that has to be given by a trained administrator.

More information, including headset, in following video...

2 mins 36 seconds. Title: GE/Intel: A commitment to the future of home healthcare

Excellent, non hyped-up, explanation of how telecare should, and can, work. In this case in an assisted living setting.

The human star of the video is ex-school teacher Honor Hacker who has featured in a number of pro-technology articles, and spoke last year at a briefing of the US Senate’s Special Committee on Aging. It's good to see she is still going strong. Here are a few of her stories from previous years:

Technology helps seniors live independently. Minnesota Public Radio, December 2005

Silent Guardians. Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St Paul, February 2007

Capitol Hill Briefing Features Technologies That Could Transform the Lives of Seniors. American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, January 2008

4 minutes. Title: MedApps Telehealth/Telemedicine Mobile Solution

What I like about this is that once the devices are connected, the user doesn't have to press any buttons.

Also has brief overview of the HealthCom monitoring interface. Medapps company website

Thanks to Bob Pyke

The American-Israel Chamber of Commerce recently held a meeting in Atlanta to expose Israeli companies to the American market and vice versa. Here are some videos from the event, including one of Newt Gingrich stressing the importance of devices being user-friendly. Videos courtesy of Leff & Associates.

Did those of us who didn't attend the Silver Summit at CES this year miss anything significant? Watch this 6 minute YouTube video and make up your own mind. You will find the other videos here.

This item is an eye-opener worth 20 minutes of anyone's time. Apart from that, you may find yourself re-thinking the current potential of the global telehealth market... Professor of Global Health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, Hans Rosling at the TED event in 2006. (More information)

3 minutes 21 seconds. Title: Telehealth in Hackney

This is the clearest explanation I have seen of how remote patient health monitoring is managed in the NHS, what patients do, and its benefits. The 3.21 minute video on YouTube does not hide its Docobo origin, but that fact is not 'in-your-face'.

Video 1: 1 minute 44 seconds
Video2: 1 minutes 48 seconds.

7 minutes. With a bit of editing and a slightly revamped commentary this video could become a useful introduction to telecare and telehealth for the public. However...

30 minutes. Presentation by Margaret Cary, Senior VP for Vox Medica in 2001. Interesting content from the telehealth perspective. Main message - it's not about the technology, which is just part of the care delivery process.

6 minutes 30 seconds. Title: Senator John Thune advocating an increase in funding for telehealth

This post continues the focus on the terminology problems (see 'Opinion' above)...

1 minute 18 seconds. Video about the RF ECG sensor - "the worlds smallest, high-speed wireless biosensor kit" - from the Japanese Medical Electronic Science Institute Co. Ltd

1min 34sec 15 Aug 2006.  Older people benefit from home alarms (West Lothian) View here
1min 32sec 23 May 2007.  New healthcare system piloted (Kent) View here
1min 47sec 29 Jan 2008.  Bed sensor helps elderly couple View here
2min 18 sec 30 Jan 2008. Advances in telecare devices (People with Learning Difficulties and Older People) View here

3 minutes 36 seconds. Title: CarePro Movie

WELbeing uses Nokia Near Field Communication (NFC) technology supplied by Over-C.

7 minutes. Title: Guardian Alert 911

Small phone device that links to US 911 services. Click here to view.

30 seconds (long version) 10 seconds (short version). Title: Alertacall Television Advertisements.

Promoting Alertacall’s Safety Confirmation Service to the general public in the UK’s Border TV region from 19 September 2007 onwards.

4 minutes. Title: ISSYS: A Hallmark of Success Company.

ISSYS researches and manufactures microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). These sensors are so small that they can be implanted to monitor pressure directly within blood vessels, the eyes and brain and communicate results wirelessly.

3 minutes. Title: A Digital Revolution for the World's Remotest Regions

Insight into Intel's ambition to connect the next 1 billion new users to the internet. It shows some examples where the 'revolution' is underway in Egypt and Brazil. Not a telehealth video directly...

6 minutes 30 seconds.

Title: Westminster - The Wireless City: Improving Business and Services with WIFI.
This addition to the video library should give ammunition to all who are looking for substantial investment in telecare. The video itself shows how Westminster invested many millions in wireless CCT systems to help keep its citizens and visitors safe on the streets. How about a similar spend to keep them safe in their homes? View the video on the Cisco site via the above link.

1 minute. Title: A great service for older people. Council and health telecare projects should be seeking similar local TV publicity to stimulate interest in their telecare programmes...

6 minutes.  Reinventing the ambulance, this amazing vehicle carries state-of-the-art teledicine diagnostics over the roughest terrain...