Can a smartphone replace your doctor?

Cardiologist Dr Eric Topol is a practitioner of the future of medical consultation – equipped with a smartphone and some sensors.

One of his patients – Bill Sousa – has recently had heart surgery and Dr Topol is showing him how they can remotely monitor his recovery.

The doctor has one sensor that check the rhythm of his heart and another that clips over the tip of his finger to determine the oxygen level in his blood stream. The sensors connect to a smart phone and a specialised app sends the results to the cardiologist’s office.

Dr Topol explained: “Instead of having it [the equipment] at a hospital for $3,000 – that’s what it costs, or more, in some places it’s up to $7,000 – you would just use your phone with this app.”

He has developed several of these phone apps himself, convinced they are about to revolutionise medicine itself.

Dr Topol says he is now prescribing more smartphone apps than drugs so he can easily follow his patients’ progress from a distance.

For patients like Bill Sousa, who lives more than an hour’s drive away from the hospital, linking up to a tablet allows him to check his blood pressure twice a day.

He is delighted with how easy it is: “It [the app] automatically sends it [the data] to my doctor, on a weekly basis. So, that’s all I have to do.”

The device is a real money saver in the US, where medical treatment costs more than anywhere else in the world..

Dr Topol and his apps are part of a trend. Soterra Wireless, a San Diego based company, has developed a portable monitoring which is already being tested in a number of hospitals.

Soterra’s Garry Manning explained how it works: “It’s able to show all of the vital signs of the patient: his heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, saturation of oxygen, skin temperature…”

And the patient’s doctor is able to follow-up in real time, via a smart phone, even if the person being monitored is on the other side of the world.

Manning said the device can speed up the process and help diagnosis: “Now, they get that information immediately, so they can make very quick decisions. Eventually, we of course, as other companies may do, will be able to take that information and be able to start to predict the patient’s deterioration, ahead of time.”

The ultimate goal is to be able to predict someone’s medical future.

Dr Topol believes that soon we wil be able to detect diseases with sensors placed on or under our skin: “Someday, maybe five years from now, we will have tiny nano-sensors in the blood. They could detect cancer showing up for the first time in the blood.”

What if in the future those devices could replace doctors – diagnosing and anticipating?

Imagine your son has a rash. A small device identifies it, says it is benign and advises some rest.

Or your daughter doesn’t feel well. A sensor takes her body temperature, and analyses a urine sample. This time the app recommends a visit to the hospital as soon as possible and give you directions to the nearest one.

It is not science-fiction, but something which can become a reality very soon.

Men Feel Threatened When Girlfriends Succeed

Men may subconsciously suffer a bruised ego when their wives or girlfriends excel, regardless of whether it's in the academic or social realm and regardless of whether the couple is in direct competition, a new study suggests.

Psychology researchers found that men had lower self-esteem when their romantic partner succeeded than when their partner failed. Women, meanwhile, were unruffled by the performance of their husbands or boyfriends, the study showed.

"It makes sense that a man might feel threatened if his girlfriend outperforms him in something they're doing together, such as trying to lose weight," lead study author Kate Ratliff, of the University of Florida, said in a statement. "But this research found evidence that men automatically interpret a partner's success as their own failure, even when they're not in direct competition."

Ratliff and her colleague Shigehiro Oishi, of the University of Virginia, conducted a series of five experiments to look at how self-esteem may be affected by the success or failure of a romantic partner in heterosexual Americans and Dutch couples.

In one study, they recruited 32 undergraduate couples from the University of Virginia. Each participant was given a "test" of social intelligence. The participants read five different scenarios describing a problem someone was having at work or home and had to choose between two different pieces of advice to deal with that conundrum. The students were told there was a correct answer (determined by counselors) and their score on the test would measure their "problem-solving and social intelligence."

The researchers didn't actually grade the tests and the participants were not given their own "scores," but they were told their partner scored either in the top or bottom 12 percent of all university students.

Hearing their partners' scores generally didn't shake the participants' explicit self-esteem, or how they said they felt about themselves in a questionnaire.

But the researchers also measured the participants' subconscious self-esteem, by giving them an Implicit Association Test, which gauges attitudes and feelings that people may not want to report through rapid word associations on a computer screen. Those with high self-esteem, for example, are more likely to associate the word "me" with words like "excellent" or "good" than words such as "bad" or "dreadful." 

Compared with men who believed their partner scored in the bottom 12 percent, men who were told their partner had ranked in the top 12 percent showed lower implicit self-esteem. There was not much difference in the implicit self-esteem of women who thought their partner scored high and women who believed their partner scored low, the experiment found.

The researchers said that similar experiments held true in the Netherlands, which has one of the narrowest gender gaps in labor, education and politics.

Why the disparity? The researchers write that one possibility is that men are typically more competitive than women and thus may be more likely to see a partner's success as their own failure. Gender stereotypes may compound this effect.

"There is an idea that women are allowed to bask in the reflected glory of her male partner and to be the 'woman behind the successful man,' but the reverse is not true for men," the researchers write.

The researchers also point to previous studies showing that women tend to look for ambition and success when selecting a mate.

"So thinking of themselves as unsuccessful might trigger men's fear that their partner will ultimately leave them," Ratliff and Oishi wrote. They noted one of their experiments showed that men who were told to think about a time their partner was successful (in either the intellectual or interpersonal domain) were less optimistic about the future of their relationship than men who thought about their partner's failure.