Patient tracking has long been a concern of medical community and runs hand in hand with patient data management. Recent experience from Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Asian Tsunami show that widespread dispersal of patients to multiple sites within a region, sometimes at great distances from their home, lead to limited family assistance in care and delayed discharge. Clearly, this impeded the rapid movement of patients through the healthcare system, particularly those with chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. Providing rapid patient tracking that can be centrally verified and viewed at all response facilities is paramount in a large regional surge response.
and also enable a new generation of biomedical devices.
Over the next six months, the researchers will evaluate vibration harvesting at the meso and micro scale in relation to the needs of various implantable technologies; analyze circuit power requirements for biomedical applications including signal detection, computation, electrical tissue stimulation, and wireless communication; and create preliminary power supply conditioning circuits that maximize energy transfer efficiency from harvesters to storage and storage to load. Then, they will model, design, and prototype a thermal energy harvester for implantable medical devices.