Personal medical assistant: Future exploration

There are four model of healthcare; two of them are preventive and curative model. In Indonesia, curative model is still dominant in the healthcare business. Curative model requires more funding and human resources compared to preventive one. These two factors will cause a loss in general healthcare service. There are not enough doctors to give adequate healthcare service, due to the low ratio between doctors and patients, not to mention specialist, which is rarer than doctors. Preventive model does not show immediate result, also it requires synergic cooperation between several bodies or institutions in which may become hard to sustain. Recently there is a shift in diseases from infection to degenerative diseases. Degenerative diseases, unlike acute infection diseases, have a higher risk in miss detection by the patient. Patients cannot feel the sickness until the disease has gone from mild to severe level. Therefore it is important to be able to monitor own health anywhere, anytime. Personal medical assistant (PMA) can be considered as one of the possible alternative solution for this problem. The idea behind personal medical assistant (PMA) is personal digital assistant (PDA), an early form of assistive mobile device that later evolved into mobile phones. Our exploration shows that such merger can be done. People can monitor their own physical condition whenever they want it. This approach should be able to accelerate the promotion of preventive healthcare model. Two of the interesting points to be explored are the scaling of Einthoven triangle in measuring ECG and the capability of embedded mobile phone camera. Considering that current lifestyle is also a mobile lifestyle, it is possible to introduce mobile healthcare, where in the end it will becoming a lifestyle. When this happens the preventive model will automatically sustained.