Medical Books Go mobile

The doctor can cross reference between multiple books while on the rounds

Handheld devices are being used for medial applications in the West. Doctors carry and update patient records on their PDAs, enter clinical information such as test reports, and much more. Another popular application is carrying medical books on PDAs, and a Boston based company called SkyScape having a development center in Mumbai is in this business. They have converted about 80 titles from various medical publications into Palm OS and WinCE formats. These books are based on what they call ART (Advanced Reference Technology). This allows cross-referencing between multiple books. So, suppose you have two book titles on your PDA. When you’re referring to a particular topic in one book, which is also

covered in another, you’ll be able to quickly jump to the relevant section in the other book. This sort of indexing is automatically done the moment you load a book on your PDA. Every book has its own reader app. The typical size of each book ranges from 1 to 6 MB, depending upon how many graphics images have been used. If your PDA doesn’t have enough memory to hold a complete book, you can carry relevant portions of it. For instance, a doctor can carry link portions of a book to a particular patient’s record. The company plans to introduce an extension of the existing ART technology, and is calling it ART Beat. This would automatically update PDAs with news and articles from medical journals, magazines, medical newssites, etc. This will be possible on wireless PDAs that access the Internet. The average cost of each book is $60.

They’re currently not being sold in India because of the sluggish growth in the PDA market. For more details, check out at

www.skyscape.com. 

Contact: Skyscape, Navi Mumbai. Tel: 022-7782847/8. 

Anil Chopra