Finnish state media, YLE News reported today that “Northern Finland plans self-service health care kiosks for remote villages”
Finland’s northern municipality, Sodankylä, plans to introduce self-service health care stalls for persons living in remote locations. The pop-up medical kiosks will allow users to run lab tests, check blood pressure, as well as heart and lung activity – and to call on a doctor or nurse via a video link.
As noted in various instances on this blog and other social media, there are good frugal innovations that can be used for doing tests with or without help from a healthcare worker.
Some Examples:
1) ECG monitor developed by Finnish researchers from VTT – Beat2Phone
2) PeekVision – Professional eye exams from your smartphone . One can view cataracts clearly enough for treatment classification, detect signs of glaucoma, macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and signs of nerve disease. Other health problems such as severe high blood pressure and diabetes can also be identified with a good view of the retina. They are also currently trialling tests that they have developed for a range of colour blindness (blue, green and red) using the high definition of a smartphone screen.
3) Just go to the website – Frugal Innovations in Medicine that is curated by researchers in epidemiology, working in an academic laboratory (CRESS, INSERM U1153) in Paris, France. They have divided the solutions under the following headlines:
Of course there are disclaimers regarding CE and/or FDA certifications and actually a good amount of them are certifiable and still can be had at lower cost than legacy medical devices.