Page 25 - Mobility Management, February 2017

shape your overall risk assessment, and you’re currently not doing that because you don’t have the technology for that insight into the deep tissues.
I see a potential for nurses, for anyone who’s doing risk assess- ment, to have these tools in their pockets in the next couple of years, which will then change the risk assessment procedures that we know and will eventually save lives.
Brienza: Include time [savings] as well, because each of these MRI scans took about 15 to 30 minutes, and with the ultrasound probe, we’re able to obtain that measurement in a matter of minutes. But it’s also done at the bedside, so that’s hitting other points: We have the patient lie down in a seated posture on a plinth [for an ultrasound], versus having to transfer into a seated MRI, which is challenging for people that have a spinal cord injury. And the transportation [for an MRI] just adds hours of time compared to minutes [to conduct an ultrasound assessment].
Gefen: It’s important to not only describe things as they are today, but also to look into what could happen in the very near future as we see miniaturization of these ultrasound devices. So they will be very cheap to the point that every nurse could have one in his or her pocket and they will do that regularly, five or 10 times a day, whenever they see a patient, whenever they suspect that there is something going wrong. Much like in Star Trek, they
could put this device on the skin, and it will give them complete diagnostics, or if not complete diagnostics, at least the internal anatomy. Actually, the technology does exist today, and it’s just a question of time until we see it commercially.
Q: How Could This New Technology Improve the Continuum of Client Care?
Mobility Management: It sounds as if ultrasound, because the technology is more efficient to use and particularly if miniatur- ization literally places an ultrasound device into the pocket of every acute or long-term care nurse, has the potential to greatly expand and improve risk assessment.
Gefen: The other thing to think about is the development of a field in engineering or computer science or in both that we call big data. Being able to monitor, at will, anatomical or any other type of features in the body and then comparing them to a huge database of measurements being taken at the same time in the same facility, or in other facilities and being stored in the cloud. And then being able to analyze [observations of a patient] in real time because we’ve seen that patient’s normative data — [are current readings] deviating from normal values?
Again, that data being transmitted to the cell phone of the
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