The Multidisciplinary Congress in Cardio-Thoracic Healthcare was held in Ottawa, Canada, August 17–20, 2006. The Congress focused on some of the fastest-evolving areas in cardio–thoracic healthcare, namely medical devices, interventional procedures, pharmaceutical agents, imaging technologies, cell-based therapies and surgical approaches. The Congress Chairs were Sir Magdi Yacoub, Joel D Cooper...

The Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (ARHAI) was created at the height of the incidence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). This article describes the role of ARHAI in the evaluation of laboratory testing for CDI, a related consultation on the legal requirements for manufacturers of in vitro diagnostic medical devices, a CDI healthcare bun...

This study approaches bioethics as discourse inside broad cultural changes and also in its growing impacts on the constitution of the healthcare professional's identity. Two theses, based on Giddens' theoretical framework, are presented. The first is that bioethics potentially is an abstract system that is capable of producing reflection and of organizing the experience and the subjective ident...

The rapid aging of the world’s population, along with an increase in the prevalence of chronic illnesses, requires adaption and modification of current healthcare models. New trends on healthcare technologies fall into the use of autonomous systems that allows the capturing and monitoring of physiological parameters anytime and anywhere. One approach involves tele-health applications, many of w...

For more than 40 years, Analog Devices’ comprehensive portfolio of linear, mixed-signal, MEMS, and digital signal-processing technologies have helped make a difference in healthcare designs in areas such as instrumentation, imaging, and patient monitoring. This article will focus on capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) technology, which enables the use of high performance capacitance sensing ...

All pregnant women need easy access to pregnancy-related personalized information, on-time quality healthcare services and effective communication links with healthcare providers. Smartphone-based devices, communication systems and eHealth applications can play an important role in facilitating some of these services to pregnant women in a fast and efficient way and can thus prevent most of the...

Progress in mobile devices, wireless networks and context-aware technologies are bringing pervasive healthcare into reality. With the help of wireless PDAs and portable computers, people may enjoy high quality care from a well-orchestrated team of healthcare professionals in the comfort of their own homes. The main technical challenges include mobility, adaptability, privacy, access authorizati...

Healthcare professionals, working in hospitals experience a high level of mobility due to their need for accessing patients’ clinical records, medical devices distributed throughout the premises, and colleagues with whom they collaborate. In this paper, we present how autonomous agents provide capabilities of intelligence and proactivity to healthcare environments furnished with ubiquitous comp...