Ubiquity is a long way off.
[ Posted by Dan on May 27, 2003 | 1 Comments ]

My daughter has an eye infection (her first ailment) that isn't serious, but bad enough to make us call the pediatrician for the first time. We had to leave a message and the on-call person called us back pretty quickly. She asked me what was wrong and asked that I describe the nature of the goop coming out of my daughter's eye.

Optimally, I could have used my digital camera to take a picture, and show it to the pediatrician over the good ol' Internet. Unfortunately, all of my gear requires physical connections to communicate, and compiled applications to pass files back and forth, and human intervention to route things appropriately. This is the first time that I have thought that the new breed of cell phones with crappy digital cameras in them would actually be useful.

Of course, the person on the other side of the equation needs to have the same carrier, or gear and/or level of comfort with the tech to receive the image and attempt to make something from it. Ubiquity is a long way off, and so are the systems/applications we need to allow folks like me to easily send useful info to particular individuals on demand.

 

		hmm...this is one more reason for me to consider working in the medical field--was just listening this weekend on NPR about HIPAA, doctor consultation via email, security, and the like...i was thinking "man i'd like to work with others who are helping these guys get their thoughts and tech straight" and your post gets even more gears going in my head. i dunno how those cams work but i would assume (and hope...my hopes have been dashed before in this area) that you'd be able to simply email a pic you took, so that takes care of that... hmmm...yet again...the medical field never particularly excited me, 'cos i didn't think there were any interesting questions that i would want to investigate, but this weekend, and your post (and the broadening of my interests lately :) have helped a bit. so thanks. -Posted by jon on May 29, 2003 01:02 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).