[IP] Your Trekkie Communicator Is Ready
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Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 15:40:10 -0800
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Your Trekkie Communicator Is Ready
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To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Your Trekkie Communicator Is Ready
Arik Hesseldahl, 03.16.04, 3:00 PM ET
<http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/03/16/cx_ah_0316chips.html>
It's no accident that the conference rooms at Vocera Communications
headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., are named after characters from the Star
Trek universe--Kirk, Spock and Picard.
Just as the communicators that Captain Kirk carried down to alien planets
in the 1960s version of the Viacom (nyse: VIAb - news -
people ) TV show foreshadowed a world with ubiquitous mobile telephones,
the two-ounce badge central to the Vocera Communications System was
inspired at least in part by the "com badges" that appeared on later
versions of the show. Just as Captain Picard would do, Vocera badge wearers
can touch the slim device they wear on their uniforms, say who they want to
talk to and, assuming that person is wearing his badge, be connected.
The badge contains two chips, one a digital signal processor chip from
Texas Instruments (nyse: TXN - news - people ), the other a fairly
unremarkable wi-fi radio not terribly dissimilar from those found in any
Wi-Fi networking card used in a laptop PC. The TI chip handles all the
voice processing and the wi-fi radio transmits them up to a computer network.
That's where the real work takes place. Hitting the badge button and saying
a name triggers a powerful server-based application that matches the name
spoken with a database entry. It then locates that person on the network,
activates their badges and starts the conversation, which takes place using
Voice-Over-Internet Protocol or VOIP--meaning the voices are converted to
bits and transmitted over a computer network.
The Vocera badge has been available only for a year. Brent Lang, a vice
president at the privately held company, says the company has 60 customers
using it, and more than 40 of them are hospitals or health care providers.
"Once we had a prototype, we started doing research into who might want
to use a product like this," Lang says. "At one point we had nothing more
than a bunch of PowerPoint slides, that we showed to health care
organizations, and we had nurses in tears saying 'Where has this been all
of my life?' "
It turns out that communication in a hospital is often an amazingly
inefficient affair. Nurses and doctors spend a lot of time playing phone
and page tag. Nurses need approvals for treatments from doctors who often
aren't easy to find. Paging the doctor usually takes several minutes, by
which time a nurse may have left the station where she was waiting. Then
the whole process starts over until finally one catches up with the other.
With the Vocera badge, a nurse needs only to hit a button and say the
name of a doctor. The request goes over the hospital's wireless network to
the server, which then locates the appropriate doctor and delivers the
message more or less instantly. If the doctor is available he or she can
respond right back. If not, the nurse can ask for another doctor, by name
or by specialty. Say "I need an anesthesiologist," and the server finds the
nearest anesthesiologist and connects him.
All that time, otherwise lost waiting for instructions or other
communication, adds up. One study by the First Consulting Group, a
healthcare consultancy based in Long Beach, Calif., found that when the
300-bed St. Agnes Healthcare facility in Baltimore deployed the Vocera
system, its nurses saved more than 1,100 hours a year, while the entire
organization saved some 3,400 hours.
It's also easy to integrate the system with desktop phones and mobile
phones. The database software allows the device to forward its messages to
phones and pagers and also can accept calls forwarded from phones.
Vocera was launched four years ago by Robert Shostak, a software engineer
who started a company called ANSA Software, now part of Borland (nasdaq:
BORL - news - people ). Vocera has investments from both Intel
(nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) and Cisco Systems (nasdaq: CSCO
- news - people ).
The company is next looking at deploying the technology with big
retailers and manufacturing concerns. Vocera has been working on tests with
both Target (nyse: TGT - news - people ) and Best Buy (nyse: BBY
- news - people ). The U.S. Department of Defense is also showing
interest. Sailors aboard the Navy's sea-based battle laboratory ship, the
U.S.S. Coronado, have installed the Vocera system to speed up
communications between crew members. And yes, Star Trek fans, there is,
somewhere in that fictitious Federation Starfleet, a spaceship by the same
name.
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