smart hospital

When the University of Virginia hospital had problems with some of their blood samples in their pneumatic tube system, they turned to one of the most increasingly ubiquitous and handy tools so many of us now have at our disposal: the smartphone.

Using their old smartphones' accelerometer to assess the forces acting on the blood samples during transit, a clinical chemistry postdoctoral fellow and a professor of pathology conducted an experiment. With one smartphone taking recordings and the other shedding light on the video, they sent their phones through the hospital's system. The footage was revealing - the longest track of tube was the problem, and they found frothiness and bubbles which dissipated soon after arrival. They concluded that the smartphone was a great way to monitor such systems.

The pneumatic tube experiment has been written up in the journal Clinical Chemistry. You can find the video footage which supplements the article here. Could this be the first time that tube cam footage has been submitted as scientific evidence??

Read more in the UVA Today article.

running outdoors

Long Branch Mike has alerted me to another amazing pneumatic tube system - the one running underneath Indiana University Health's People Mover, which connects several hospitals in Indianapolis.

These outdoor hospital tubes are pretty impressive - they remind me of riding the monorail to Disneyland as a kid. The gaps in the rails are designed to prevent the collection of snow. Although as Mike wonders, how do they keep the tubes from freezing in the winter? Must investigate.

Image by Dina Wakulchik from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA - Clarian Health Partners People Mover, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5193131.

how iphones helped solve a medical mystery

While hospital pneumatic tubes work well a lot of the time, sometimes there are mishaps - contents of containers might spill for example, or objects get stuck, or blood samples clot. There are all kinds of ways of finding out the problem spots in pneumatic tubes - I am currently writing a book chapter on how sound is used for example. But today I wanted to write about another method used recently at the University of Virginia - the iphone repair method.

Two pathology professors at the university theorised that it may be due to points of high pressure that there were problems and sent two iphones through their hospital tubes to check. One phone had a sensor app and a light source and the other recorded the journey of a blood sample. The footage surprised them - the blood's journey was like a blender, "like you are mixing a margarita". The hospital no longer sends their blood on long journeys to avoid the cocktail-effect.

You can read more and listen to the story here, on WVTF public radio.