Archive for July, 2010
Android Optometry
We’ve commented before about the ability of telemedicine solutions to bring cutting edge technology and quality of care to emerging economies. One example is some of the recent work that the Camera Culture Group from MIT’s Media Lab has done by building a clever optometry solution into an accessory and an application for Android-powered smartphones (HT: Engadget).
The concept is very cool. Many optometrists today use autorefractors, machines which scans the images formed on the back of a patient’s retina to get a rough, but automated, measure on the quality of your vision. Optometrists will then use phoropters to get to a precise enough measure of your eyes as to be able to prescribe lenses for contacts/glasses.
The problem with this approach is that autorefractors and phoropters are too expensive and too time consuming for widespread use in many places around the world. The NETRA solution that the Camera Culture Group came up with was to build an accessory and an application which force a user to make a pair of lines overlap using controls on the phone. Doing this repeatedly lets the application do a calculation similar to what is done by an autorefractor to calculate the quality of the user’s vision in a process which is much faster (several minutes) and cheaper than a standard eye exam (more details in the video and images below)
The project website shows a very compelling table which compares the relative prices and accuracies of optometry solutions in existence today.
It’ll be interesting to see where this technology can go once displays similar to Apple’s Retina Display become cheaper and more prevalent. This example definitely shows the power of telemedicine approaches and is hopefully a harbinger for more equally compelling and innovative solutions for the needs of scientists and doctors around the world.
Data, not in papers
The always thoughtful Deepak Singh brings up a great point in a recent post on his personal blog:
Not all data should be published via a peer-reviewed publication. Not every protocol needs to be. But making the data available via wikis, open data resources is pretty much a no-brainer and not just for the future. You enrich currently available data, and have the ability to leverage an additional layer of resources.
Deepak isn’t the only guy to think this, Derek Lowe from In the Pipeline raised a similar point:
Perhaps there should be a way to dump chemical data directly into some archives, the way X-ray data goes into the Protein Data Bank. That wouldn’t count for much, but it would capture things for future use. Having it not count much would decrease the incentive for anyone to fill it full of fakery, too, since there would be even less point than usual. And before anyone objects to having a big pile of non-peer-reviewed chemical data like this, keep in mind that we already have one: it’s called the patent literature, and it can be quite worthwhile.
(all emphases mine)
I think they both have a very good point. Some form of centralized data repository, even if non-peer reviewed, could help tackle the problem that everyone hears about but nobody ever tries to solve of not having a central place to share negative results and protocols (akin to what this blog proposed previously for bio/pharma companies).
It could also help us re-prioritize publication and peer review efforts away from sheer data collation which, while extremely important, is distinct from experimental/study design, data analyses, and drawing conclusions where peer-review is more valuable (there’s only so much peer-review can do to when looking at a data collection effort in isolation).
With modern internet technologies being as fast and as scalable as they are now, there’s simply no reason to use the traditional journal to chronicle every single discovery or achievement. Better to collect most of it in API-accessible/index-able repositories so that others can share in it and curate it and instead focus publications on building analytical insights.