Continuous speech recognition enabled palm pilots are in the pipeline and are slated to be the killer application doctors will arm themselves with before they take to the wards in the non-too distant future.
Although current speech recognition software isn't 100 percent accurate, it's close to having the capability of correcting any mistaken word on-the-fly.
Pocket-sized devices, home to such software, are on the drawing board, delayed in part by the problem of getting the heavy-duty processor and memory needed to power such software down to battery-run capacity.
When it finally hits the hospital wards, it'll be more than just a zippy speech enabled palm pilot, it'll be a single device incorporating a digital mobile phone, plus pager.
"It could take anything from three to four years before [US] organisations really start rolling the technology out - unless it becomes very cheap," Gartner Group's VP of healthcare industry research and advisory services, Dave Garets, told ZDNet.
However, "I've seen a lot more leading edge technology [in Australia]," Garets said. "Technology seems to be test driven here to see how it flies before rolling it out in the US. There's not a lot of reticence in Australia, so the pick-up may be quicker here than anticipated," Garets added.
The device, however, would still need to be integrated into hospital systems and historically this sort of thing has always been a problem.
If it can be figured out how to share information between this device and other hospital systems, "it'll sell like hotcakes," Garets said. "But if it requires a bunch of integration - forget it," he added.
Paving the way for this killer application is the plain old palm pilot.
A significant number of doctors are already using palms in the US, according to Garets and in comparison uptake by the Australian medical profession has been slow.
"American hospitals have spent a large percentage of their budgets on IT," Garets said. "There aren't as many places per capita in Australia that have gone to that expense."
However, Aussie company Lifecare Health Limited has developed software for palm pilots aimed to support physiotherapists.
"We were looking for something that would help physiotherapy practitioners be more efficient in what they do," Lifecare Health MD, Richard Bevan, told ZDNet.
"The concept of a palm sized computer has a lot of merits," Bevan said. "The good thing about it is it's a time-saver. It allows the practitioner to go on interacting with the patient, it's not an application where you have to sit down at a desk, you can continue recording things as you go," he added.
Trialed for four months in physiotherapy centres in Western Australia, LifeCare Health claims its Spinal Management software has garnered international interest.
"There's a big market out there," Bevan said. However, "not many people in the health industry use palm pilots. We haven't come across anything on a large scale used in [Australian] health care," he added.
