A Nurse Practitioner's View

A little bit on technology and how it is impacting health and patients. As an admitted techno-geek, I am passionately following mobile technology and where it is popping up in health. A cool app that I recently downloaded is Instant Heart Rate for my iPhone 4. This is a free app and requires no external hardware. According to their website, it works by placing your finger over the iPhone's camera and it "tracks color changes in the light that passes through your finger." I used it and found the readings to be fairly accurate. It is also available for Android as well. The basic app is free and for a $0.99 upgrade it adds features allowing you to document what you were doing at the time of recording, viewing graphed results over time, and auto-posting the results to Twitter. As a clinician, apps such as this can help patients keep accurate data to review with their providers at their visit. It is exciting to watch this technology develop. Today it is heart rate monitorin...

No, this has nothing to do with breast feeding. This post is really a non-healthcare topic but I just needed to vent. Back in the Winter , I blogged about my passion for technology and looked forward to the new iPad coming out. To preface, I have always been a PC guy and never really understood the whole Apple fascination. I had many PCs and was very comfortable troubleshooting any issues I had. Though, I did have many different of the iPod models and had purchased the 3G iPhone back in October 2008. Well, I did decide to purchase the 32 GB Wi-Fi iPad and hopped on board the Apple gravy train. I woke up early that Saturday in April and headed on down to wait in line at my local Apple store. Overall, I am happy with my purchase as I knew it wasn't really a replacement for any device that I'm currently already using. This for me was really a "nice to have" rather than "need to have" purchase. I do have an issue with the device which is known by Apple and the...