Doctor’s appointments and Student Health services appointments take time and are inconvenient. However they are the primary method through which contagious diseases are diagnosed, and contagious patients are treated and instructed to remain at home to limit passing on their disease. If technological methods for providing preliminary diagnoses of patients more conveniently and expediently than doctor's visits, patients could be alerted to go to a doctor and stay home from work, when the would not otherwise have done so. This would reduce the spread of the swine flu pandemic.
Technologies such as this already exist; the photo below looks like its from a science fiction movie, but it’s really a Chinese health official using a infrared thermometer to screen airline passengers for fever to prevent the spread of swine flu. However, I believe biotechnology has much more potential for the noninvasive monitoring of physiological data and diagnosis of disease than infrared thermometers.
Source: Montreal Student Returns to Morocco with A(H1N1) Swine Flu, montrealgazette.com, June 12, 2009
I wrote previously (blog entry “Bioengineering?”) about pulse oximeters that can measure physiological date non-invasively using beams of light. I believe this technology has the potential to non-invasively and expediently screen patients for many different physiological signs indicating many different diseases.
In the future, health screening machines located in the college houses at Penn could measure physiological data from students to help them decide whether their symptoms warrant a visit to the doctor or not.
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