Smart Phones Save Lives
Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.
What smart phone apps do you know that are about health?
What important smart phone apps would you like to see in the future?
On a flight from Washington, DC to San Diego a passenger had a heart attack.
The pilot’s urgent question reverberated over the loudspeaker during flight across the USA, “Is there a doctor on board?” A passenger was experiencing severe chest pains, and luckily for him Dr. Eric Topol was sitting in seat 6A.
Dr Topol is a prominent cardiologist and a famous person in the knowledge of wireless medicine. He believes the future of health lies in our own hands, in particular in our smart phones and other portable electronic devices. According to Dr Topol, “the smart phone will be the hub of the future of medicine. And it will be your health-medical dashboard like in a car.”
That day on the airplane, Dr. Topol displayed the possibility of wireless medicine when he quickly put a specially made device onto his iPhone and performed a cardiogram at 30,000 feet. Using this portable, cellphone powered device, Dr Topol was able to see that the passenger was definitely having a heart attack and he recommended an urgent landing. The passenger was rushed to the hospital and survived.
Dr Topol said this was a “Eureka!” moment for him; such devices could lead to better and cheaper health care everywhere, from airplanes to senior citizen’s homes.
“These days, I’m prescribing a lot more apps than I am medications,” he continued.
Dr Topol points to an increasing number of apps and devices, none of which he is paid for using or endorsing, that are capable of measuring important signs and then able to transmit that data to smartphones. Whether it’s your blood sugar levels, your heart rate or your sleep habits, Topol believes we should follow our own conditions through our phones and use that data to see patterns and warning signs of illness.
Dr Topol speaks of a time in the near future where human beings are digitized through sensors in the bloodstream. He explains, “By having a sensor in the blood, we can pick up all sorts of information, whether it's cells coming off an artery lining [indicating heart attack], whether it's the first cancer cell getting in the bloodstream, whether it's the immune system revving up for asthma or diabetes or any other problem. All these things, will be detected by sensors in the blood which will then talk to the phone.
Guessing meaning from context (the words around that word or phrase).
Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning.
The answers are below the table.
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