Selecting a device for monitoring patient activity and collecting patient data
Specifications and more specifications
Given all the available choices in the Android marketplace, we quickly realized that we needed to determine which specs would be most important to the project. We suspected it would be impossible to get everything in one phone. After conferring with the team, we concluded that the most critical function of the phone would be data collection. All of our criteria are detailed in our phone specifications table.
Testing our first phone
Given these dimensions the candidate phone that was selected for full scale testing was the Google Nexus One. This phone met our criteria and has a very fast and capable processor. The device has a large screen with high resolution and runs under Android 2.1. It has a removable 1400 mAh battery that provides 5-6 hours of internet use time. It has good memory and external storage capability (512 MB ram and a 4-32 GB microSD card). Our developers are now busy testing the phone’s performance in many different settings. Stay tuned and we’ll let you know what worked well for us, and what left something to be desired.
By Jay Levinsohn, BreathEasy Technical Lead, RTI International.
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The Android platform
The BreathEasy project has been in the process of determining what kind of devices would be appropriate and useful for collecting health information in a patient population. Early in the process it was determined that a smart phone was the device most likely to be useful. In today's environment it quickly became apparent that selecting among the emerging Android based smart phones would provide a set of very able technologies.
The general Android platform and development environment was selected for several reasons:
- it is an open system with a growing development environment
- there are many vendors for both hardware and software
- the hardware platforms have adequate screen size for data collection
- it supports multitasking
- the software development tools are either free or very inexpensive
Specifications and more specifications
Given all the available choices in the Android marketplace, we quickly realized that we needed to determine which specs would be most important to the project. We suspected it would be impossible to get everything in one phone. After conferring with the team, we concluded that the most critical function of the phone would be data collection. All of our criteria are detailed in our phone specifications table.
Testing our first phone
Given these dimensions the candidate phone that was selected for full scale testing was the Google Nexus One. This phone met our criteria and has a very fast and capable processor. The device has a large screen with high resolution and runs under Android 2.1. It has a removable 1400 mAh battery that provides 5-6 hours of internet use time. It has good memory and external storage capability (512 MB ram and a 4-32 GB microSD card). Our developers are now busy testing the phone’s performance in many different settings. Stay tuned and we’ll let you know what worked well for us, and what left something to be desired.
