SAN FRANCISCO – Sean Chai tapped the screen of the tabletop home medical monitor, which began to talk.
“Put the blood pressure cuff on your arm as shown,” the computerized voice told a visitor to Chai’s research lab in San Leandro, Calif. “Please relax and remain still while your reading is being taken.”
After uploading data from the blood pressure cuff, the monitor asked whether the visitor had taken his daily medication.
In the future, the answers could trigger scheduling software for a doctor’s appointment or initiate a direct video call to the physician.
Chai is the senior information technology manager for Kaiser Permanente’s Sidney R. Garfield Health Care Innovation Center. His job is to imagine the future of medical technology and test gadgets to see whether they are practical.
The 37,000-square-foot center, in an office complex near Oakland International Airport, is celebrating its third anniversary as the technology research and testing lab for the nation’s largest non-profit health maintenance organization.
The center has a full-size mockup of a hospital floor, complete with nursing stations and patient rooms, plus an operating room, simulated home and mini-clinic. Kaiser employees can use the center to test everything from new types of hospital floor material or workflow adjustments to robotic nursing assistants and high-definition operating room video screens.
Sherry Fry, the center’s operations specialist, said the complex intends to work out the bugs of a new system or concept before they are deployed to hospitals and patients. The center shares its findings and has drawn 17,000 visitors from 29 countries, including health care workers, university researchers and tech innovators.
In the simulated mini-clinic was a prototype stainless-steel kiosk that looked like a cross between a bank ATM and an airline self-check-in machine.
“So imagine in the future, you use a kiosk like this to quickly check in by inserting your membership card and also do your co-pay by inserting a credit card,” Chai said.
A self-service kiosk is already being tried in about 100 Kaiser hospitals in California. It can be programmed to respond in several languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Armenian. Kaiser plans to add other functions, such as a way for patients to check their blood pressure, weight, temperature, oxygen level and pulse.
“By the time the doctor calls you in, you’re ready for that examination, you don’t have to go to the nursing station,” Chai said. “Imagine someday, we can locate that in a shopping mall or in a community center. Then you add a camera, and you can literally project your doctor onto the screen, so it becomes sort of a doc in the box.”
Another area resembling a living room and kitchen has several desktop self-care devices, including the talking Intel Health Guide made by Santa Clara chipmaker Intel Corp. In April, Intel announced a five-year, $250 million joint investment plan with General Electric Co. to develop personalized home health care devices.
“The idea is to leverage these technologies to help us stay connected with patients, especially patients suffering from chronic conditions like congestive heart failure, hypertension,” Chai said. “Those handful of ailments contribute 80 percent of U.S. health care costs.”
The center is also testing lower-tech home monitors, such as one made by Honeywell International that resembles a digital clock radio. It’s part of a pilot project involving 600 congestive heart failure patients.
