DOC INVENTS POST-SURGERY APP (Orthopedics This Week)
Michael Dunbar, M.D., a surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital and a professor in biomedical engineering at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada, was finding it hard to keep up with the long line of patients needing hip and knee replacements and post surgery check-ups. So he invented a smartphone app.
Dunbar’s app uses the accelerometer in smartphones to analyze the gait of a patient. “It can measure the centre of mass displacement very accurately” said Dunbar, “The accelerometers are pretty simple and pretty powerful.”
Here is how Dunbar envisions it working. Patients would get a text message or phone call from the doctor telling them that it is almost time for a checkup and to strap their phone on and go for a walk within the next week or so.
“It’s going to be hard for this not to be more accurate than what we’re doing already,” said Dunbar. “What we are using now is just a two-dimensional X-ray, which is very blunt, and is just a picture of the patient lying down, and has nothing to do with the patients’ walking around and how they get around in space.”
The app works by strapping the phone on to the patient’s back or ...
