Samsung CMO Uses Gear S2 to Monitor Passed Out Patient on Plane

This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I’m always impressed by stories of doctors doing amazing things on airplanes. So, you can imagine my interest in this tweet from Dr. Rhew, Samsung’s Chief Medical Officer.

A doctor doing something to help someone who’s sick on a flight is nothing new. Some of you might remember that Colin Hung wrote about how Dr. Rasu Shrestha helped a passenger during his flight to HIMSS. Eric Topol is also famous for saving someone’s live on a flight and for averting an emergency landing after using his AliveCor ECG to help a man who lost consciousness.

Each of these stories should be applauded. I can only imagine how grateful these people were to have a doctor on their flight that could help. Although, the stories about Dr. Topol and the one from Dr. Rhew from the tweet above are particularly interesting to me since they both used a piece of mobile health technology to assist them in their work with the patient. In Dr. Topol’s case it was an Alivecor ECG and in Dr. Rhew’s Case it was the Samsung Gear S2 watch.

I’ve actually heard from doctors that the medical kit on an airplane is surprisingly good. However, they no doubt don’t have an ECG or heart rate monitor. So, it’s pretty amazing that each of these doctors had these tools at their disposal and that each of us could easily be carrying one of them around with us now with no trouble at all. In fact, in the case of the heart rate monitor, a lot of us are already carrying one around.

This will get even more exciting as more sensors go mainstream and are able to monitor other parts of our health. Of course, use of these sensors doesn’t have to be on a plane. It could just as well have been on a soccer field at your kid’s soccer game. In that case, you may not even need one of the other parents to be a doctor. Your cell phone could quickly Skype/Facetime in an emergency response doctor who could walk you through what was needed and assist you with the injured child. Plus, that doctor could remotely see the vital sign readings coming from sensors on/in your phone and on/in the injured person.

We’re not there yet organizationally and politically with some of what I described, but the technology is definitely there for everything I described. It’s just a matter of time for it to become a reality.

It’s an exciting time to be working in healthcare.

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Update: Here’s a nice little postscript from Dr. Rhew:


I agree with the passenger. That is so cool!

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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