The Apple iPhone: Your New Medical Buddy March 23

by VirtualTest

Picture this: you are away on business, but your doctor only gave you the go-ahead with the condition that you need to monitor your blood pressure or your blood sugar levels and keep your doctor informed about your status at regular intervals. Sounds cumbersome? It may not be soon.

Apple’s announcement last week of a new operating system for the iPhone – iPhone OS 3.0 – comes with new capabilities and applications that will make these activities a breeze for iPhone users. Aside from being your mobile business assistant, the iPhone may also become your medical assistant in the near future.

Two of the more interesting applications are for blood pressure and blood sugar monitoring. A blood-pressure cuff can be plugged into the iPhone connector, and an application will then take care of delivering the controls needed for inflating the cuff and measuring a person’s blood pressure. If you think that’s amazing, the iPhone OS 3.0 will take this one step further, by having the ability to send the results to the person’s attending physician using 3G technology. This way, the doctor can perform remote real-time monitoring of a person’s medical status and make changes to medication as soon as it is needed.

The other application is for testing blood sugar levels. The application can tie a blood glucose test to an iPhone. The connection will enable a diabetic iPhone user to download the results where it can be read as a graph.

The iPhone will also have the ability to connect the user to real-time information which will help determine whether there is a need to adjust insulin or medicine intake, as well as to other iPhone users or community of experts who can provide feedback and input on how to manage diabetes.