"Physical therapy is not a subspecialty of the medical profession and physical therapists are not medical doctors; we are a separate profession that provides a unique service that physicians are unable and untrained to provide."

Letter to the AMA from the APTA, Dec 2009

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Cell Phone Inventor at ATA Says "People Want to Move..."

Martin Cooper was an engineer at Motorola in 1973 when he stood on a Manhattan street corner on April 3rd and placed the world's first public cellular telephone call.

The rest, they say, is history.


Cooper expected millions, not billions, of cell phone users to use his product. This image is a replica of the original 2.2lb. cell phone that had a 20-minute battery life.

Today, there are 6,915,756,494 people in the world and over five billion cell phone users.

More people have access to cell phone networks than have access to...

  • clean running water
  • electricity
  • regular dental hygiene

But Cooper doesn't bear the stigma for these social inequities - he is still hopeful that mobile technology can help solve some of the world's most pressing disease burdens.
"Technology doesn't mean a thing unless it makes people's lives better..."
...he said at the Keynote Speech kicking off the American Telemedicine Association 2011 annual conference in Tampa, Florida.
"People are mobile, they're naturally mobile - they want to move around".
Cooper envisions mobile technology implanted in our bodies - able to detect the genesis of new cancer cells and call that finding into a doctor who will then call the patient back for an appointment.
"Every disease can be actionably prevented," he said, "The cellular industry is still in its infancy..."
I admire Mr. Cooper's optimism.

I wonder what creative uses physical therapists can find for cellular technology to encourage our patients to "move around"?

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Tim Richardson, PT owns a private practice at Medical Arts Rehabilitation, Inc in Palmetto, Florida. The clinic website is at MedicalArtsRehab.com.

Bulletproof Expert Systems: Clinical Decision Support for Physical Therapists in the Outpatient Setting is a manager's workbook with stories, checklists, charts, graphs, tables, and templates describing how you can use paper-based or computerized tools to improve your clinic's Medicare compliance, process adherence and patient outcomes.

Tim has implemented a computerized Clinical Decision Support (CDS) system in his clinic since 2006 that serves as a Reminder, Alerting, Prompting and Predicting CDS using evidence-based tests and measures.

Tim can be reached at
TimRichPT@BulletproofPT.com .

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