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Wii Balance Board Gives $18,000 Medical Device a Run For Its Money
Gizmodo highlights a very cool repurposing effort for the Wii's Balance Board accessory. Rather than the specialized force platforms used to quantify patients' ability to balance after a trauma like stroke, doctors at the University of Melbourne thought that a Balance Board might serve as well. Says the article: "When doctors disassembled the board, they found the accelerometers and strain gauges to be of 'excellent' quality. 'I was shocked given the price: it was an extremely impressive strain gauge set-up.'" Games controllers you'd expect to be durable and at least fairly accurate; what's surprising is just how much comparable, purpose-built devices cost. In this case, the Balance Board (just under $100) was compared favorably with a test platform that costs just a shade less than $18,000.
Video games: Why waste good technology on science and medicine? Kidding aside, I think that it's a good thing that these machines are being re-purposed. I wish that we could do it for a lot more equipment and drive down the cost of health care a little.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
I had been prescribed a medical device to assist in night time breathing... after asking the clinic person to show me an itemized list of parts and costs, I was shocked at the bill - over $2,200 (USD). She was annoyed that I wanted this list printed out because my insurance was "going to pay for it anyway..."
A few months later, my insurance no longer wishes to pay the rental costs - so I have to return it or pay $250/month. Found online for $700 new and delivered with three years of support.
Only when you put medical care in a truly competitive market is when you'll actually see competitive prices.
Oh ,there is much more to it than that...
A friend of mine recently had to wear a device that helps bones knit faster by using electromagnetic fields. The device cost (his insurance) $5000. I am an electrical engineer, so I couldn't resist tearing it apart to see what it was. Maybe, maybe, $20 worth of electronics. More likely $5 when manufactured with coolie labor in China.
And the reason my friend was willing to let me tear it apart? It can only be used once! It is designed to permanently disable itself after one period of treatment.
What a waste of time and resources. What a gouge to the medical consumer. You wanna talk about controlling health cost? Start here.
Medical malpractice lawsuits are tort cases... and we know how much testing is only done because of fear of the lawsuits. Limit the liability, and there would be much less wasted medicine being practiced.
Hasn't seemed to make much difference in Texas - the state with so much tort reform that the Governor likes to brag that malpractice insurance rates have come down - but no metric that measure the quality of healthcare has improved, for example:
Even worse - most of the malpractice savings have gone to the insurance companies, because malpractice payments have gone 67% but malpractice insurance premiums have only gone down 27%.
Public Citizen, Dec 17th, 2009
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Not really. I think what's happening with consumer gear becoming more and more complex and "agile" is that the whole concept of expensive custom hardware is becoming obsolete.
While some devices (MRIs, x-rays machines, ultrasound imagers) are legitimately expensive, other gear, such as the one in the article, are being revealed to be extremely simple devices that are simple marked up due to the OEM knowing that their target market has deep pockets.
In some ways, it's analogous to the software movement in the late 80s where software engineers and their tools were in such shortage that they were only found in high budget corporate and government settings. The commodification of computers led to computer programmers becoming commonplace, allowing the development of cheap software development on consumer grade computers and paving the way for the open source movement where programmers' time is in such supply that they can afford to give it away for free(tm).
The mass production and wide availability of advanced components such as accelerometers, GPS chips, DSPs and other previously prohibitively expensive items are bringing highly sophisticated applications into the realms of the consumer where novel ideas are being explored and old expensive ideas are being redone with a Made In China label on them.
Finally, I could maybe buy the insurance line if we were talking perhaps even a few multiples, but a $100 device to $18k? That's one hell of an insurance policy.
What you fail to see, and what the GP identified successfully, is risk. Now, with average consumer equipment the risk is very close to zero. If it doesn't work, no biggie. Get the customer to return it and 2-4 weeks later he'll get a replacement. If he gets hurt in the process of using it, no biggie either. We just told him we're not responsible for any dumb accident he might run into. If that can't be excluded, the price goes up.
I hate car analogies like anyone, but in this case it's one of the things where liability is part of the price. Faulty cars can result in incredible cost, and that is reflected in the price. You get the same with dangerous work and the compensation you get for it. And illegal drugs are not really expensive due to high manufacturing costs either, or an insane demand compared to the supply (you'd be surprised how high the supply for some drugs really is...). It's the risk involved.
You can actually get medical equipment very cheaply, provided you declare that you will not use it for human use. What else you could use a heart monitor for is beyond me, but when they can strip liability from the price tag, the price goes down. Considerably down. Think 1/10th of the "all warranties included" price tag. It's probably easier to see for the everyday user with consumables. Syringes can be used for more than injecting something into a living body, thus you can get the same syringes with or without "medical" quality. Both kinds are essentially the same syringes. One kind is "certified" and thus with all liability and warranty attached, one isn't. Both are equally sterile, simply because the manufacturing process is the same, they roll off the same presses. Now compare the price.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Here's another example. Back a long time ago (late 70s) when I was at university we had a professor doing "Aids for the Blind". He was working on a computer system that could synthesize human speech. He had about $50,000 of DEC minicomputers plus another $20,000 of hand-built D-A converter boards in the lab, and was able to successfully read individual words from text files and convert them to almost recognizable speech. That summer TI released the Speak and Spell, which did better speech synthesis for $29.
There are different levels of IR.
The IR that most people are familiar with is just below the visible spectrum, which lets stuff like the Sony camera shoot in the dark, with an IR emitter. Basically, a light that it can see by.
Thermal imaging IR is "long IR", which shows heat. Anyone above 0 degrees kelvin puts off light at very low frequencies that we can't see. And no, there's no such animal as a $500 thermal imaging camera. You're looking at a starting price of about $3K. If Sony, or anyone else, were to produce a camera that retails at $500, they'd definitely do it. It's not a privacy concern that keeps the price high, it's the simple fact that the components are still very expensive.
Seeing through walls is pure scifi. You'd see the temperature of the wall. You may (just may) see something through a wall, if it's hot or cold enough to change the temperature of the wall. Like, you could see the general shape of a fire through a wall, because it's heating the wall. In scifi it works through "suspension of reality". You believe what you're shown, because it's necessary to the plot. Some people don't understand an impossible technology used in a movie, so they assume that it's real.
You'd be able to see through a glass window though, assuming nothing pesky like blinds are in the way. So, a couple having sex in a dark room, seen through an open window, is perfectly possible. Either IR would work, but that isn't quite what was suggested.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yes, but all of what you just said further illustrates why govt. bureaucracy is causing our medical expenses to spiral out of control. It's not sustainable. The only people who really "win" in this mess are the attorneys, and all the talk of medical reform in the USA right now conveniently skips changes in THAT area.
Not long ago, I was reading about a heart surgeon in India who among other things, got tired of the high cost of medical sutures. Apparently, the only supplier of the ones he needed was the Johnson & Johnson company, and they kept increasing prices each year. He finally got some investors together, who opened their OWN manufacturing facility to produce the sutures in India at a far lower cost, so he can now buy from them and cut at least 35% off of his annual expenses for them. (Since he's running huge clinics doing nothing but heart surgeries there, he benefits more than most would from "economy of scale".)
It seems to me, that's exactly the type of change the medical field needs to see. Unfortunately, government legislation often seems to stand in the way of progress here in America. (A doctor my friend knows heard this story about the medical sutures and angrily protested, "But I'm not even legally ALLOWED to invest in such a thing as a surgeon in the US!")
As it stands now, doesn't it bother you at least a LITTLE bit that you had to fork out upwards of $250,000 in *lawyer fees* just to prove that it was ok for a hospital to start using what's really just a touch-screen PC in a hardened metal frame?