Published 3rd October 2017
What if you or a loved one happens to be unfortunate enough to suffer from an ongoing illness? Well then you’d quickly become familiar with the bi-monthly trek to your doctors surgery and the routine questions that come along with it. After a quick blood pressure and heart rate check comes the standard two minute quiz:
“Are you sleeping OK?”
“Have you been exercising regularly?”
“Are you taking your medications?”
“Anything else unusual going on?”
The doctor makes a few notes and that’s the extent of their data collection, whether you have a rare blood disorder that only 1 in 100,000 people contract, or frequent migraines. This brief encounter is how they discern any variations in your symptoms, find the best path of treatment, and assess your overall wellbeing. It’s not much to go on, and still our health care physicians deliver sterling work and dedication, but….
What if...
What if instead of receiving two minutes of data every two months, your doctor could receive your vital statistics twenty four hours a day - everyday? What if your sleep patterns, your steps, your caloric burn, your heart rate and more were constantly streaming to your doctor? What if they could see the data for every pill you take, every eye drop, and every injection? What if they could see your symptoms journal for every headache variation, every element of fatigue, and every new pain? What if they could monitor your food journal for every diabetic variation?
What if doctors could analyze and compare this data with thousands of other patients who suffer from the same illness as you? What if they could find the key triggers for variations in your condition? What if they could find the indicators for better well being and even identify the path to a cure?
What if your doctor could message you instantly when they discover something to discuss with you? What if you could do video calls with them when you’re having a problem, or vice versa when they spot a change in your symptoms?
What if you could send out emergency alerts to your family or carer when you’re having a seizure outside your home? What if you or your doctor could schedule your next appointment instantly without even having to pick up the phone? What if you had access to emergency consultation from a health care professional at anytime, anywhere?
Why keep asking ‘What if?’
All this technology is available now and we’ve already built it.
At Analog Republic we’ve worked with some amazing teams to turn this technology into reality. We’ve built telehealth platforms for doctors to text, call, and video with their patients at any hour of the day, Utilizing remote devices like digital stethoscopes and blood pressure systems to provide basic health care to patients in their homes or rural locations.
We helped develop Epi-Watch - an Apple watch app that tracks the day to day wellbeing of Epilepsy sufferers by testing cognitive skills and collecting seizure severity data by utilizing the gyroscope and accelerometer in the apple watch. It can even send geo location alerts via SMS to carers and loved ones in the event of a seizure in a public place.
We’ve built an app for a Multiple Sclerosis study at Duke University that enables both sufferers and non-sufferers to track their symptoms and medications. We’ve built apps for cataract patients to prepare for surgery by monitoring their eye drops and provide photos of their eyes to doctors for analysis. We’ve built apps and websites for the University College of San Francisco providing research into better healthcare for the LGBTQ community.
We want to do more.
We want to connect patients with the best doctors for their diagnosis.
We want to help in the fight against cancer.
We want to help prevent illnesses and injuries with data collection.
We want to make people’s lives easier with appointment schedulers, medication reminders and health journals.
We want to find ways to help the elderly, the blind, the kids with ADHD, and anyone else in need by innovating new technologies and finding new ways to use the technology we already have.
If you have an idea or a project that you could use our wealth of experience on, please get in touch, Because the only ‘What if’ question we should be asking is,
"What if….we could help."