www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2009/02/how-to-use-s60-in-the-medical-field.html
How To Use S60 In The Medical Field
By Dotsisx on February 11th, 2009
Frequent readers of the Symbian-Guru blog know that I have been involved in the medical field for over 5 years now, being a recently graduated pharmacist and having just now become a medical science researcher. As a matter of fact, it is this involvement in the medical field that sealed my commitment towards S60 in the first place, when I discovered that I could have medical ebooks on my device and use them as a reference everywhere I go, instead of carrying dozens of heavy books. This goes in tandem with our deep belief here on Symbian-Guru that a mobile should enhance your everyday life and not complicate it or overshadow it.
Throughout the years, I have tried to find guides, applications, hints as to how to enhance my medical experience on S60, but always stumbled on Palm or Windows Mobile guides. There are ZERO guides for S60, well, as far as I (and Google search) know. So I decided to put together a list of tips to use for those of you who are in the medical field and carry S60 devices from Nokia or Samsung or LG (Nokia N95, N81, N82, N96, N79, N85, E71, E66, E90, 6210, 6220, 6110, 6120, 5800XM, Samsung Innov8,… and others as well).
The Free Solutions
Mobireader and free ebooks
Mobireader has been my battle sword for everything medical on my phone from my very first S60 days. I have already previewed it here on Symbian-Guru, and I can’t emphasize on how much useful this ebook reader has been. You can download the S60 version from their site or directly from your mobile by going to http://m.mobireader.com. After downloading the reader and installing it on your handset, you can google around to find free medical ebooks. I have done my fair share of searching and I can say without a doubt that I have found 3 awesome sources.
The first one is NCBI with 6 mobipocket ebooks. My personal favorites amongst these are Clinical Medicine which resembles a bit the Harrison’s in the way it is presented, as well as Medical Microbiology which is an absolutely awesome reference on infectious diseases and pathogens.
The second one is an eMedicine series of references. I downloaded these a long time ago and I can’t seem to remember where I got them. The zip file includes 16 mobipocket ebooks about different medical fields (critical care, nephrology, oncology, allergy and immunology, dermatology, transplantation, general surgery… to name a few).
The third one is Clinical Approaches (you have to register on their site to be able to download the ebook). It’s a reference of symptoms and clinical states, with the causes, the approach, the drugs to use,… for each of them. It’s a pretty neat and bulleted list of practical advices for medical students.
One last thing worth mentioning is that the free online dictionary, WordNet, was converted to the mobipocket format which you can download here. It’s not a medical dictionary per se, but it does contain a lot of basic information about medical terms, which might turn out to be highly useful, and is the next best thing to a medical dictionary. The best part is that you can use WordNet as the lookup reference inside Mobipocket.
Mobile-Optimized websites
The first website that you would want to bookmark on your S60 browser is Wapedia. I have reviewed Wapedia before but I think I haven’t mentioned enough how much I love it. It’s easily the best way to access Wikipedia (and we all know how much medical information is on there) on your mobile phone and offers the full Wikipedia experience in a mobile friendly format, with images, tables and tons of settings. Simply go to http://wapedia.mobi and choose your language. Worth noting is the fact that you can view Wapedia in different languages, and you can bookmark each one seperately. Personally, I have the Wapedia french and english pages bookmarked.
The second wesbite you’ll want to add is the National Library of Medicine mobile. The site contains links to search none other than THE reference for medical publications, PubMed, in several ways: direct search, journal abstracts, PICO, natural language search, and symptom and disease association search. The search results are presented with the article’s title, authors, journal, PubMed ID, as well as links to the abstract, the full text and related articles. Free articles will also open in a mobile friendly page, with images, tables, links, and everything working just fine. My only caveat is that there is no way to know whether an article is free or not before waiting for its page to load.
Then there are 2 other ways to search PubMed, with quirks. The first one, Pubget (http://pubget.com/mobile) allows you to restrict your Pubmed searches by title and abstract, author, or even the articles from the latest issues of journals. Also, if the article is free, it won’t open it, but instantly download it to your phone, which is more than just awesome. The second one is Unbound Medline (http://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/ebm) which will give you the same format of results as PubMed mobile, but adds the Full Citation link for each article, allowing you to check the credentials and abstract before opening the article. The best part is that it will only give you the Publisher Full Text link if the article is free, otherwise, you’re left with the abstract.
Another site you might want to add to your bookmarks is Epocrates (http://m.epocrates.com/iphone) which won’t work that well on the S60 Browser, but will work very nicely in Opera Mini.
Of course, when none of these work, you still have Google Search and you can always try to find what you’re looking for on it.
RSS Feeds
There are tons of medical-related RSS feeds that you might want to try, but I stumbled upon one of the best sources for them. If you go to BioMed Central’s list of Journals, you will see a long list of journals, most of which are Open Access (free full articles). The journals don’t have incredibly high Impact Factors, but they are a good way to stay updated with the news in the medical field of your choice. Simply open the Journals that you’re interested in, and look for the orange RSS icon next to the “Latest Articles Published in…” section. Add it to your RSS reader of choice (a personal preference goes to Google Reader on the computer and its iPhone mobile version). The RSS feed doesn’t include the full article, but it does include the title, abstract and authors. By simply opening it, you will get a link to download the full article as a PDF.
Podcasts
I am not a big fan of podcasts, but I know as a matter of fact that there are a lot of medical podcasts that you could download and listen to on your S60 device. My advice would be to look for them in the iTunes library then input their feed address into your S60 Podcasting application.
The Paid Solutions
Mobireader and paid ebooks
Although Mobireader is free, the Mobipocket site offers a huge library of paid ebooks, with one section dedicated to medical ebooks. These range from the silly cheap ebooks to the unbelievably expensive ones, but you can find just about anything there for your specialty. Mobipocket ebooks are DRM’ed and can be installed on any 4 devices at the same time, which isn’t half bad. Personally, I have purchased 7 ebooks of which my 3 favorites are dictionary-like:
A2Z drug Facts: an awesome drug reference.
ADR: although it stands for Arab Drug Reference, it’s a cheap alternative to A2Z and offers a lot more trade names, especially European and Arab ones, compared to the US-centric A2Z. Also I find that it has more details in the pharmacology sections.
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary: THE medical dictionary to have, bar none.
iSilo
iSilo is another ebook reader for S60 which reads ebooks in .pdb format. It’s available for purchase for around 20$, but you can still run it in Free Mode (with lots of limitations). The good part is that if you do some search, you will find tons of free medical ebooks in .pdb format compared to free Mobireader ebooks. A good place to start is MemoWare (look for ebooks in iSilo 3 format).
Skyscape
Skyscape are very well known in the medical field and they started offering their applications probably a year ago for S60. Their whole portfolio isn’t available for S60, but a great percentage of it is.
StyleTap and Palm apps
Another alternative to get medical applications on S60 would be to buy StyleTap, which I already previewed in beta and was later released. StyleTap would allow you to run Palm OS applications on your S60 device, and you can easily find medical (freeware and shareware) applications for Palm to run using Styletap.
In Conclusion
As you see, the possibilities are very numerous when it comes to accessing medical information on your S60 devices, especially when you have an open platform that allows you to run any kind of application, and a powerful browser to search for anything that isn’t available in those applications. I hope that this tutorial will help those who are still wondering how to get medical applications and information on their mobile device.
Are you in the medical field, or do you know someone who is? Do you use your mobile for medical information, and do you know any other tip about getting medical information on S60?
同样的 这些变通的方法与手段在blackberry上也是适用的
虽然在palm上有很多医学软件
但是这些软件只不过是我们的工具而已
真正要理解 运用 还是要靠我们的思考
平台与工具容易成为我们思考的陷阱