Slashdot Mirror
Build Your Own ECG
Jason writes "I finally finished documenting my $4 home made electrocardiograph (heart monitor). If anyone is interested or wants to build one for themselves, please come by and take a look. Makes me wonder why medical care costs so much. :)"
wxWindows has plotting functions, and is cross-platform and GPL. We don't need no stinking VB *shudder*. Less than 10$ in parts, but a hundred bucks in software?
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
All of it can. It's just that there isn't a single company out there willing to risk the lawsuits. It's easier to spread the risk out among several cardiologists.
Oh don't get me started on medical equipment, [read: I'm going to get started on medical equipment]
Being disabled (SMA type 2, A type of MD, Donate to MDA!) I deal with medical equipment a lot, less then some in more critical situations, but more then your average user.
It's outrageous the markup medical tag gives to an item, one of the most outlandish of them that I saw was a flag, a metal mounting bracket, fyberglass rod, and cheap neon flag. You know the kind, sold in the walmart bike department for a measly 3$
Do you know how much they wanted at a medical store? No you dont.... 18$
So the price of "medical" is 15$ on top of 3$ It's insane.
You can buy an Ok car for the price of an electric wheelchair. And that's just for what's on the low end.
How exactly are people who can't walk suppossed to affoard this shit? Sure it's possible, and often times picked up by the government (thank god)
And if you're not covered, forget footing this bill your self, unless you've got cash to burn. And it's not like the freedom of mobility is important or any thing. Just one of life's liberties some people take for granted.
"I wish I could sit all day"
Fuck you buddy
Grrr, can you tell I'm bitter?
And then theres red tape. I've been using this same wheelchair for several years now, it needs replaced. But fighting for them is a nightmare. So much paper work.
Computational Madness in a round package.
It's not impossible to kill yourself with a badly-designed ECG device.
Places like UL/CSA say that voltages under 40V or so are safe. But if you apply it to electrodes pasted to your chest, the unsafe voltage is WAY lower than 40V.
If you build a simple ECG and connect it to a computer, that computer had better be battery-powered. If not, then you might get a nasty surprise (waking up in the afterlife of your choice.)
((((((((((((( ( ( ( (o) ) ) ) )))))))))))))
SCIENCE HOBBYIST amasci.com
A disgustingly large amount of our medical expenses goes to malpractice insurance, and mostly to protect from one of the millions of malpractice cases that never should have been that occur each year. Granted, the ability to sue for malpratice *is* a good thing. However, it is grossly misused, and results in higher medical bills for all.
Not to say that's the only factor... but that's one of them.
So, we could hook the EKG up to his server, and watch it flatline?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
You don't really need it to be 100% accurate or not, what it needs to be able to do is know when it's accurate, and when it's not. If the algorithm can determine when it's diagnosis is shaky or not, it can then page a cardiologist. If a cardiologist only has to check up on the 5% of cases that the ECG can't figure out for itself, that's a massive reduction in work load.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I can tell you that many of us clinicians laugh out loud at some of the machine "interpretations" that ECG machines generate.
NEVER trust a physician who allows his ECG machine to interpret your tracing... run for the door... I'm quite serious about that. If the guy doesn't have the expertise to read your tracing himself, don't trust your cardiovascular health to him.
I've sent people home with ECGs that read ****ACUTE MI***** in large, upper-case font on the top, because the machine was totally, completely wrong. The only thing it's sometimes useful for is in reading QT intervals, and occasionally rate (though the machine can be easily fooled on this one as well).
Have a doc read it, preferably a cardiologist. Of course, if you don't want to pay a guy like that for his expertise you don't have to... but you get what you pay for.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
then for capital punishment why bother with an electric chair with hundreds of volts and significant amerage? Why not just use a 12-volt car battery and a little gel? A Die-Hard perhaps?
But aren't you comparing bad doctors to good engineers? On the one hand bridges do collapse and chemical plants do explode, and lots of people have died because of engineering failures. And on the other hand many doctors do make difficult diagnosis and perform succesful treatments.
Econ 101.
Inelastic pricing.
You pay whatever we ask, or you die, or lie there in pain and fear.
Oh, and we'll pretend we have these standards for quality of drugs and equipment and caregivers, but that's just to forestall liability. This stuff is just as crappy as the stuff you buy at Walgreens, and these people are just as incompetent as the people who work at Walgreens.
And half of it is padding and sandbagging because you're too ignorant to know that you don't use a rheostat in a colonoscopy.
And we have all the money now, so we own the votes we need to stop you whenever you try to change the system by changing the law.
Now. Back to the price.