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FreePulse Patient Monitor a low-cost patient monitor for use in developing world
- adrianN 11y agoDoes "for use in developing world" mean "isn't compliant with regulations in developed countries", or why isn't a cheaper monitor also interesting for eg the US?
- sremani 11y agoI think Healthcare device experimentation will move outside OECD, just because of the high-safety and high-precision requirements.
- wyager 11y agoWould you rather third world countries have no medicine than medicine that doesn't check all the FDA's (mostly pointless) little boxes? And yes, medical equipment in the US is absurdly overpriced due to extreme overregulation.
- rstevens24 11y agoTruth. Also, with the way insurance works here, it's actually more cost effective for companies to make a more expensive device. If you're selling for a US market, you lose money by making your prices competitive
- rstevens24 11y agoHey adrianN, creator of the project here. "For use in developing world environments" means built to perform to hospital specifications but without the cost markup or over-the-top complexity of a developed world piece of equipment. I've spent about four months working in hospitals in Rwanda and Nepal fixing donated "developed world" medical devices, and the fact of the matter is that 35% break within a year of donation and 95% within 5 years. This project is built so that it is easily maintainable, easily repairable, works out-of-the-box, and is at a price point that developing world hospitals can afford to purchase with their budgets (~200-300 USD, according to my sources in Rwanda). Also, most developing world hospitals have a very high nurse turnover rate, making it critical to make the device simple enough to be used by staff who haven't been trained yet.
- rstevens24 11y agoWill be making a blog post at reecestevens.me/blog about this very soon (within the week), so check back around Friday and I'll be able to give you a more fleshed-out response (with pictures!)
- you_eeeeeediot 11y agoWould love to see more details on this. I've checked the one (and only) blog entry from the creator... not much there either. Call me a skeptic, but shouldn't there be more detail when people are being asked to help fund this. Lovely idea for a product though, and definitely doable with todays off the shelf tech.
- rstevens24 11y agoHey! Sorry about the lack of material on the blog, I set it up about last week so I haven't had a chance to post too much yet. The code for the project is open source, hosted at https://github.com/ReeceStevens/patient-monitor https://github.com/ReeceStevens/patient-monitor. Look for a new blog post coming up this week with a lot more background about the project. I also have blogged about my work in developing world hospitals that led up to this project; that info is at http://www.reecestevens.svbtle.com http://www.reecestevens.svbtle.com.
- wyager 11y agoI'm not the author, but I'm friends with the guy who made this. I don't think the github repo is public yet, but he said he's planning on making it public soon after a bit of cleanup. And yes, this is real hardware that works. Reece has been working on this for a long time, and I'm glad to see it on HN!
- jrnichols 11y ago"with probes built to measure ECG, SpO2, NIBP, and more" automated nibp? 3 or 4 lead ECG? or 12 lead? I'm more curious about the hardware than anything at this point.
- rstevens24 11y agoHey jrnichols! The device measures 3-lead ECG and has semi-automatic NIBP; the user pumps the cuff up to max pressure with a hand pump, but the pressure is measured and released automatically by the device.
- rstevens24 11y agoA blog post with more background for the project can be found at http://reecestevens.me/blog http://reecestevens.me/blog !