When your carpet calls your doctor

Wireless health is "becoming omnipresent" in hospitals, according to Kalorama Information, a market-research firm; it estimates that the market for such devices and services in America alone will grow from $2.7 billion in 2007 to $9.6 billion in 2012.

Don Jones of Qualcomm, a maker of networking technology, argues that the trend speeds diagnosis and treatment, and saves doctors' and nurses' time. GE, an industrial giant, and Sprint, an American mobile operator, have joined forces to offer hospitals such services. GE's Carescape software allows the secure monitoring of patients' health via mobile phones, as does rival software from Airstrip. Doctors are an obvious early target for wireless health. A forthcoming report by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), a think tank, estimates that two-thirds of American physicians already have smart-phones. Over one-third of American doctors use Epocrates, a program for mobiles and laptops which offers instant information on drug-to-drug interactions, treatment recommendations and so on. The software will soon be able to access electronic health records (EHRs) via mobiles—which the author of the CHCF's report thinks could be "the killer application" of wireless health. The hope is that nimble new technologies, from smart-phones to EHRs to health-monitoring devices, will empower patients and doctors, and thus improve outcomes while cutting costs.