QOTW: Do you own a smartwatch?

[3dcandy]

Someone needs to make a smartwatch with a notch. The whole internet would implode! Bit like the IT Crowd when Moss and Roy give Jen the whole internet

[virtuo]

I have a Huawei Smartwatch (v1)

It looks nice, not like a sports watch, I do use it mainly for telling the time but it's good to glance at emails/messages as they come in - see if they need me to get my phone out and follow up. Can also dismiss calls I'm not interested in without getting the phone out.

I use it to control my music, it tracks my exercise (usually just lunchtime walks but it's a nice metric to look at) the stopwatch is always handy and i can use it for directions when I'm walking through an unfamiliar city trying to find the hotel I've been booked in to.

It's a handy extension of my phone, the battery lasts 2 days usually and it's nice being able to change the watch face occasionally - although there aren't many good ones about.

[Ttaskmaster]

I won't pick up the phone with a patient in the room unless it's potentially really urgent but a glance at a watch is less intrusive.

If it's urgent, you have a pager. Phones have too personal an image already, whereas the only people who still have pagers tend to get paged in urgent professional capacities. Perhaps if you had a 'SmartPager' of sorts, that'd be a workable compromise.

That said, we can't wear watches anymore, but don't get me started on the insanity of some of the infection control regulations.

Having worked with ICNSes, I think it's insanity that nobody ever listens to them... as MRSA showed.

2) Tricorders are awesome, but they do distract you from where you're going.

That's why they come with different voice options. I use one on my motorcycle, but never have to look at the screen.

I would make an ultrasound based tricorder that scanned the area actively but the frequency required would drive dogs mad. And I like dogs.

Use a different frequency.

Oh and I have neither the technical expertise not the money or the ability to make such a thing. Small detail.

They made the TR-107 long before smartphones. It wouldn't take much to use smartphone technology to make a proper Tricorder.

Whatever damage you are doing to the environment with your dirty deisel, you could increase it by at least 50% with an electric car.

Fine - You pay for it, I'll drive it.

[Saracen]

Completely agree its value vs cost. Value being the intrinsic value you see in the product vs the cost of giving out that data to a third party.

Cant abide people who argue there is no value for anyone, but can easily understand how some would see no value in the product. Equally, those who see value in the product should have an understanding it comes with and underlying cost (e.g. privacy).

On that, then, we completely agree.

I would never presume to tell someone what they should or shouldn't like, or what value they should or shouldn't take, just because it's different to my opinion. And I can certainly see why so many smartphone functions both appeal, and gave quantifiable benefits. Even though my circumstances are such that those benefits are considerably less than theg are for many people, they still exist and I may well hsve bought a snartphone years ago .... except for the privacy issues. But for me, the latter outweighs the former

One more thing. I can get the vast bulk of the benefits that appeal to me from a non-smart "idiot" phone, that being to make and receive calls. And with a tiny fraction of the privacy exposure. But truth be told, even a dumb phone isn't really a necessity for me and I reckon when I go out, less than about 5% of the time do I bother to take it with me.

My needs and expectations are, I rather suppose atypical.

[philehidiot]

If it's urgent, you have a pager. Phones have too personal an image already, whereas the only people who still have pagers tend to get paged in urgent professional capacities. Perhaps if you had a 'SmartPager' of sorts, that'd be a workable compromise.

Oh you can bleep me but if I am with a patient I will not be getting back to you until I am free and people waste my time with non urgent bleeps so often that now it gets ignored most of the time and answered when I have time. There's a huge admin team to contact for routine stuff but people don't bother. Something that could get a message on would make a lot more sense. People also have a habit of bleeping me and then sodding off from the phone so I ring them back (sometimes before the bleep has stopped fitting) and have to wait for 5 minutes whilst they find the person who bleeped me. It is an infuriating ancient way of doing things when there are PCs everywhere and we could be sending messages to either some kind of smart bleep or to mobiles.

Having worked with ICNSes, I think it's insanity that nobody ever listens to them... as MRSA showed.

I wrote a giant response here but I've decided against publishing it. Suffice to say, if you're going to tell someone to do something for reasons of infection control, you'd better be able to produce the scientific evidence to back up what you're saying or they're going to get very, very annoyed. They've certainly turned around handwashing and put an end to some really disgusting practices (curtains around patient beds are finally getting cleaned!) but MRSA is more a microbiology issue around correct use of antibiotics which is something I've never seen infection control nurses get involved with.

Use a different frequency.

Any frequency with the required penetration for a usable range would be audible to dogs. Higher frequency = better resolution but lower penetration. Air is also a bugger as the acoustic impedance between that and what you're hitting means that a load of ultrasound gets bounced back so you'd only see the first solid / liquid object it hit.

They made the TR-107 long before smartphones. It wouldn't take much to use smartphone technology to make a proper Tricorder.

Wasn't there a huge competition getting people to do this? I can't remember who won but they had to make something that could work like a medical tricorder and record as many different physiological measurements as possible without touching the patient. It was ages ago, I forget.

Fine - You pay for it, I'll drive it.

I want an electric motorcycle - just imagine all that torque from zero... *whimper*

[3dcandy]

Oh you can bleep me but if I am with a patient I will not be getting back to you until I am free and people waste my time with non urgent bleeps so often that now it gets ignored most of the time and answered when I have time. There's a huge admin team to contact for routine stuff but people don't bother. Something that could get a message on would make a lot more sense. People also have a habit of bleeping me and then sodding off from the phone so I ring them back (sometimes before the bleep has stopped fitting) and have to wait for 5 minutes whilst they find the person who bleeped me. It is an infuriating ancient way of doing things when there are PCs everywhere and we could be sending messages to either some kind of smart bleep or to mobiles.



I wrote a giant response here but I've decided against publishing it. Suffice to say, if you're going to tell someone to do something for reasons of infection control, you'd better be able to produce the scientific evidence to back up what you're saying or they're going to get very, very annoyed. They've certainly turned around handwashing and put an end to some really disgusting practices (curtains around patient beds are finally getting cleaned!) but MRSA is more a microbiology issue around correct use of antibiotics which is something I've never seen infection control nurses get involved with.


Any frequency with the required penetration for a usable range would be audible to dogs. Higher frequency = better resolution but lower penetration. Air is also a bugger as the acoustic impedance between that and what you're hitting means that a load of ultrasound gets bounced back so you'd only see the first solid / liquid object it hit.



Wasn't there a huge competition getting people to do this? I can't remember who won but they had to make something that could work like a medical tricorder and record as many different physiological measurements as possible without touching the patient. It was ages ago, I forget.




I want an electric motorcycle - just imagine all that torque from zero... *whimper*

They are awesome - a few available in the US of A

[Ttaskmaster]

It is an infuriating ancient way of doing things when there are PCs everywhere and we could be sending messages to either some kind of smart bleep or to mobiles.

We have computers and smartphones, but people still don't respond to them. Having a smartwatch is just one more thing that will get ignored.

but MRSA is more a microbiology issue around correct use of antibiotics which is something I've never seen infection control nurses get involved with.

At Northwick Park (and several others) the ICNSes were screaming for management to start paying for decent domestics, as the lazy layabouts they contracted for far less than minimum wage were doing such a bad job (ie not doing it at all, and understandably so - They could earn more in just about any job anywhere) that MRSA was pretty much guaranteed to spread. They did also have the vehement backing of Microbiology, since the MB boss was also the ICN manager, but they all just got ignored... One patient presenting could rapidly turn into 20, 40, 60... and yet when an ICN shut down a ward for those reasons, as was her right and her duty, she would get overruled by 'Da Manigemunt'. Shortly after that, the MRSA scandals started plastering the newspaper headlines....

Any frequency with the required penetration for a usable range would be audible to dogs.

Use something other than ultrasound. Radio, maybe. You'll need decent range anyway if it's for nav, as you'll be going up to 70mph, potentially.

Wasn't there a huge competition getting people to do this? I can't remember who won but they had to make something that could work like a medical tricorder and record as many different physiological measurements as possible without touching the patient. It was ages ago, I forget.

IIRC, Viacom offered a financial grant (plus official product licencing and endorsement) for anyone who presented a workable, proper device that did Tricordery things... which is where the TR-107 came in.
Supposedly, Vital Technologies was permitted to call this device a "tricorder" because Gene Roddenberry's contract included a clause allowing any company able to create functioning technology to use the name.
Very hard to buy them now, as they ceased production and are purely collectors' items. They had sensors for colour, light, sound, temperature and a few other things - They had space for future expansion too and came with a CD-ROM for linking to PC and doing other stuff. Nothing unusual on a modern Smartphone, but amazing back in the 90s.

Cost: £400
eBay: £2,000

http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0996Septe...tricorder.html
http://treknostalgia.blogspot.com/20...er-mark-1.html


The other big one was this, but it's more of a general Xprize thing rather than specific to Star Trek:
https://tricorder.xprize.org/teams/f...edical-devices
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...ife-tricorder/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder_X_Prize

I believe this was one of their competitors: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...s-in-real-time

There was also this: http://www.gearlive.com/news/article...rder-03091253/
And this, which looks rather spiffy: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012...rek-tricorder/

I want an electric motorcycle - just imagine all that torque from zero... *whimper*

I alrerady hit 60 in under 3 seconds... but mine also sounds good.

You say electric motorcycle, I just imagine people riding round on hideous embarrassments like these:

[Saracen]

We have computers and smartphones, but people still don't respond to them. Having a smartwatch is just one more thing to ignore.

Well, quite. The solution to philehidiot's issue, and many, MANY others, is one of psychology, or maybe psychiatry.

As some here may have noted, I have a deep-seated loathing of adverts. I wasn't born with it. I grew over years. Why? Years, no decades, of an apparently ever-growing obnoxiousness on the part of advertisers who have used increasingly pernicious, intrusive and persistant methods to bombard us anywhere, anytime and anyhow, with their tripe.

That is to say, I have a chronic and severe case of ad-overload. My endochrine system has a conniption fit at the mere hint of one. I no longer care what the advert is, who it's from or even (somewhat perversely) if it's something I'm actively interested in.

Ironically, targeted ad's might actually have been an improvement, had it happened years ago AND been a matter of active participation by me, not devious and borderline illegal snooping of all aspects of my private life.

Now, I just detest adverts in ALL forms and mediums and, as I'm not really obliged to take notice of any of them, I resent all of them.

The problem philehidiot has with messages, emails, texts etc, is a direct parallel (it seems to me), and is one absolutely familiar to just about anybody in a position of authority, managerial control or decision-making - too many subordinates are either incapable of making decisions, or incapable of understanding that what might be important right now to them, is a minor and non-urgent problem to their boss or appropriate decision-maker.

For example, set up emails with categories like routine, important but non-urgent, or urgent and critical, and many people mark everything in the latter category.

An important skill for any manager is to train their assistant, secretary (or whatever) into knowing when to :-

a) deal with it themselves, and
b) leave it for the boss, when he/she has time
c) when it's necessary to interrupt the boss to deal with it right now.

To some degree at least, the military have it right .... up to a point anyway. Any private that interruots a general in the middle of an urgent meeting (or any other time, for that matter) to sign of a stationery req is likely to receive a short, pointed and highly unpleasant lesson in the meaning of "chain of command".

A large part of the reason I don't use email much these days is, first I no longerneed it, and second, the adverse noise to signal ratio. A smart watch simply transfers that same noise to signal ratio, to my wrist.

It's also why I often don't carry a phone with me when I go out - in order to improve the signsl to noise ratio, only a handful or two of people have the number, and they all also know only to use it if it's really important, and that a better method unless it's botn important and urgent is my home number ... which has a similarly low distribution list, AND a call-blocker to filter and or restrict ease of access.


I severely limit access mainly because I can. Lots of people, due often to work, don't have that luxury .... and infortunately, also don't have the authority a general has over a private to instill a sense of caution.

[philehidiot]

We have computers and smartphones, but people still don't respond to them. Having a smartwatch is just one more thing that will get ignored.

I think a bleep with text / smart watch which could display text messages would illicit a response. I will respond very differently to a message saying “it’s the morgue, we need to discuss a patient with you” from “patient in resus, need you 5 minutes ago”. That the screen is visible without distracting from the patient in front of you would I think make a difference.

At Northwick Park (and several others) the ICNSes were screaming for management to start paying for decent domestics,

Oh you have no idea how much we value a decent cleaner / domestic who takes pride in their job. The problem with this is you only notice them when they’re not doing their job properly which is a shame. If we ever meet for whatever reason, allow me to tell you tales of private hospitals and cleaning. These are tales I shan’t be putting down in writing. Unfortunately the management will likely have done a very cold cost analysis which is “how much to treat patients with this infection Vs how much do we lose by breaching targets?”. The core of the issue is the government targets – they fine those hospitals worst off and force horrific stuff like you’ve just described. The problem is that the lack of a profit incentive means there’s no reason for hospitals to improve efficiency, etc if everything is ticking along nicely with adequate funding. Hence they keep them in a constant state of crisis. Not too long ago I was in the ED for 20 hours on a trolley because there were no beds. I was pretty out of it so I didn’t notice but my poor fiancé and mother ended up staying there as well. The issue here is that once someone has breached the 4 hour wait you might as well let their wait a little longer and get someone admitted who is on 3 hours and 59 minutes so you don’t get fined again. They’d stopped me from dying so as far as they were concerned I could wait. Incidentally whilst this time they stabilised me in the ambulance before moving me (there was an advanced paramedic in the area, handily) the time before with the exact same thing they blue lighted me to resus and after they’d stopped me pegging it I waited about 20 mins and was up to a ward. The difference in 18 months was between a first world system and frankly a war zone style triage system. </rant></ramble><new_beer_open=1>

Use something other than ultrasound. Radio, maybe. You'll need decent range anyway if it's for nav, as you'll be going up to 70mph, potentially

I wasn’t thinking of navigation, I was thinking about mapping an area and producing data about the materials it’s made of.

IIRC, Viacom offered a financial grant…

I’ll have a gander at these, ta. I never saw how this thing turned out.

BIIIIIIKEZ!

My bike also sounds good and does 0-60 in less than 3 seconds… well, apparently it can. I can’t. Some variety of skill is required for that. Unfortunately it also does around 40mpg. Actually, I’ve just got a new helmet and for some reason it lets my exhaust noise in really badly and so I’ve had to finally give in and get ear plugs. Given it shakes the house I should have done it a while back. Sorry, what was that about neighbours? I can't hear you for some reason.....

I’ve got a GSX 1250 FA which is basically just a big Bandit with a fairing but the best part is that is makes peak torque at 3700 RPM which is also exactly where it sits at 70mph in 6th. As much as I whinge about it being cheap, I love that engine. It is basically electric the power delivery is so smooth.

EDIT: You ever had a supermoto? Now those are fun... shame I do a lot of motorway work or I'd have bought one.

[Ttaskmaster]

I think a bleep with text / smart watch which could display text messages would illicit a response.

I still think it's a cultural/association issue - Pagers have long been the domain of emergency-summoning for doctors and other important people. If they see you check your phone, they think you're dashing off to meet a friend. If you check your watch, they'll think you're clocking off early to go play golf.

If your pager goes, they'll think you have a Code Blue in ICA and will be riding atop a gurney through the ER while performing CPR on a GSW, shouting for someone to "Get me 15cc of thorazine, intubate this guy and prep the OR - STAT!!!".... or however they do it on Gray's Anatomy these days!!

Oh you have no idea how much we value a decent cleaner / domestic who takes pride in their job.

Ohhhh yes I do....
That's the very problem - We didn't value them at the time and we lost them, ending up with employees of the lowest bidder.

Unfortunately the management will likely have done a very cold cost analysis which is “how much to [do whatever our job is] Vs how much do we lose by breaching targets?”.

^ That is the mentality of many a company in many an industry, not just healthcare. We do the exact same. I daresay that was the root cause of the Grenfell Cladding, too...

I've seen a patient drop, right in the middle of the main walkway through the centre of a hospital. Nurses immediately ran over to attend, but when they called for the nearby ward (maybe 15 yards away) to hurry over with XYZ medical/resus kit, the senior nurse and ward manager refused... on the basis that it would come out of her budget and this wasn't one of her ward's patients!!!

I wasn’t thinking of navigation, I was thinking about mapping an area and producing data about the materials it’s made of.

I'm sure there are other dog-friendly emmisions we could use. Something with a "Lay-zerr", perhaps?
Wouldn't you also need the sonic stuff to be right up close against the outside of the structure, and thus away from doggy ears?

I’ll have a gander at these, ta. I never saw how this thing turned out.

Skip the TR-107. It's as usable and worthwhile as an 8-track tape, nowadays. I think my digital watch has greater functionality...

I'd be interested if you get that Clamshell one, though!!

It is basically electric the power delivery is so smooth.

My main concern with electric bikes (all EVs, really) is in how fast they can go without making any noise. A massive part of our world and our biological safety response is geared primarily around sound - We respond based on visual clues, but those are informed first by sound - That's why your ears don't close when you sleep and why music is used to such great effect in movies.
So yeah, that and the mere idea of giving already bad drivers a vehicle that can out-accelerate my bike - Recipe for destruction.

[Lordhawkwind]

I own a Samsung S3 Frontier watch and wear it every day. Really like it and as well as giving me notifications it has an inbuilt golf GPS that you get from Samsung Gear that i very accurate and doesn't need your phone to work. Very happy with purchase.