It is difficult for me to imagine the daily challenges faced by people with visual impairments or dyslexia in a world predominantly designed for those without these difficulties. Today in the UK, Intel’s Digital Health Group has announced the launch of the Intel® Reader, a device designed to help transform the printed word into speech.

This mobile and handheld device is about the size of a paperback book and is designed to increase independence for people who have trouble reading standard print. In the UK alone, there are an estimated six million people with dyslexia and two million people with visual impairments such as partial sightedness or blindness, for whom reading printed words is difficult or impossible.

The Intel® Reader works by pointing it at a page of text, for example a book or a news paper, and taking a picture of it. The image is then converted into digital text and is read back aloud to the user. On its own, this is pretty cool but the device is a lot more flexible than that. It can also work in social settings – reading restaurant menus, grocery prices or the sports results, bringing independence and confidence to the user. If you had a lot of text to capture, a portable capture station is also available.

For the techies out there, some of the latest Intel technology is under the hood including an Intel® Atom™ processor, an Intel® Solid-State Drive and software developed on the Moblin Linux platform.

Both the British Dyslexia Association and the Royal National Institute of Blind People have announced their support of the Intel® Reader as an important advance in assistive technology.

More information on the Intel® and information on where to buy it are available at www.intel.co.uk/reader

Please enjoy this rather humorous video made by a YouTuber call 'ServerWhistleblower'. We don't know who you are but keep them coming!

'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

Your IT Galaxy Team.

In this morning’s opening keynote at the Partners Connected Health Symposium, Dr Jason Hwang, co-author with Clayton Christensen of the Innovator’s Prescription spoke about the application of disruptive innovation on the healthcare industry.

Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. This disruption allows new consumers to begin to use the technology whereas in the past it was inaccessible to them. This can be seen in the computing industry where the technology has moved from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs and to smart-phones, which has also moved the location of the technology from a central location to being accessible anywhere it is required. This decentralization through disruption leads to increased accessibility but it is important to note that companies often add functionality through innovation faster than consumer wants or needs the technology

In healthcare this same move to centralize everything, can be seen with the co-location of multiple services and technologies all under the same roof in a big hospital. The emerging trend however is to move this care provision from a central location out into the community and into the home. This also means that different people will be able to deliver the care such as nurses and empowered patients themselves, supported by new technologies.

This in-turn requires us to look at the dominant business model in healthcare where everything is centralized on the general hospital. This implies that many different types of technology and specialities in one location. The business model then has to support all of these resources but with the number of hand-offs that result, it can be prone to error and forces increased costs to maintain profitability.

Hwang asserted that hospitals are expensive conflations of three specific types of business models:

1)      Solution shops – typically very dependent on people offering diagnostic and intuitive activities on a fee for service basis

2)      Value-added process businesses – typically process dependent where a certain task is repeated enough times to where it becomes possible to accurately predict the outcome, for a fee.

3)      Facilitated Networks – where users, both providers and patients, transact and interact with one another on a fee for membership basis.

As disruption occurs in the healthcare industry, Hwang believes that a number of changes will occur to these business models

-          Specialist hospitals will emerge to address the solution shops model, bringing together a number of different specialties to reach a diagnosis sooner

-          Treatment centers focused on a particular procedure, e.g. heart by-pass, where technicians can be involved in delivering the treatment, rather than doctors, as they have been specifically trained on parts of the procedure and repeat it on a daily basis

-          Social networking through sites such as PatientsLikeMe, empowering individuals to do more for their own care delivery

Dr. Hwang concluded however, that each of these new propositions will require new value networks to gain traction in the market and for this to happen, having the right partners will be key to success.

The second keynote this morning was from James Mongan, MD, CEO of Partners Healthcare.

Within a few months there will likely be a bill signed on healthcare reform but Mongan believes that it will not have realised everything that was set out to be achieved. He asserts that the work on reform will continue for a number of years afterwards.

Despite the fact that there are huge numbers of uninsured, most still receive the treatment they need. What doesn’t happen though is that treatment for chronic conditions is not delivered in a preventative manner.

One proposal in the reform legislation is to introduce an Individual Mandate but Mongan asserts that this appears to be a new tax with another name. There may be restrictions on who actually pays this mandate but it doesn’t address the core need for insurance reform.

But what about the issue of controlling healthcare costs? Barriers to cost include the way costs are reimbursed and the lack of integration of the provider systems. With most items that you buy, you benefit immediately, but with healthcare payments you benefit later

It is likely that any new legislation will blend taxes, employer payments and individual payments but the key issue is the fairness of financing – who pays and how much? In Mongan's opinion, it needs to be a balance between individual liberty and justice for all.

I'm currently on a plane to Munich for our annual training event for the team where we will no doubt have some powerpoint fest (personally I prefer October fest!).  I shouldn't knock it as the training is excellent, very interactive and well received by the team.  However, I think we'll have a sweepstake about the total number of slides.  I'm guessing 8 sessions a day * 30 slides each for 4 days is approx 960 slides.    Personally, I'd really like to see 10 slides max in a 45 minutes presentation and have  people talk to the slides rather than repeat verbatim what's on them.  What are people thinking when they do that?  That I can't actually read. 

Now I'm on my soapbox - well actually I'm still on the plane which is delayed because of the storms - my 2nd gripe is that people cram as much on to the slides as possible.  In fact, I've done some analysis of this in the last 30 seconds.  The higher up the company structure one goes, the less cluttered the slides are.  When you get to CxO level, there's normally some nice pictures and graphics, only 3 bullet points consisting of 3 words and the message is articulated really well - the slides tell a story rather than being a story to read.  Others try and get as many words in 8 point font onto the slide as possible.  Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan when it's used correctly - it's almost a victim of it's own success.

I don't think Intel is alone in this, and judging by some of  the presentations I saw at VM'09 I know it isn't.  Perhaps the industry should adopt a 10 slide rule.  If it can't be explained in 10 slides, then either it's far too technical for my brain or the audience will fall asleep.  Any tips out there on how to make presentations more fun, stimulating, interesting etc.  or got any interesting death by powerpoint stories.  Any takers for the largest number of slides in a deck? 

I mentioned that I went to VM'09 last week at Earls Court.  It was good to get out of the office and talk to some customers as well as hear and see what other industry players are doing.  One thing that did catch my eye (and not just mine) was the Microsoft Surface demonstration.  This looked like one of those table top pub games from yester-year (ok - I'm showing my age here).  Totally interactive - no keyboard/mouse  - you can resize photos just by making your thumb and index finger closer together.    I'm sure it won't be long until this is in a form factor that can hang on the wall. [Caption competition anyone?]

Last week Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Google Health and previously involved in many other successful ventures, launched his new company – keas. This is quite an interesting development as the goal of keas is to help you understand what your health data means and how you can use it to be as healthy as possible.

Keas works by getting you to complete a basic health questionnaire and to answer some questions about your family history and your wellness goals. It then assigns certain care plans to you, which, in theory, enable you to either manage your condition better or assist you in achieving your wellness goals. These care plans are designed by experts but do not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

What makes this proposition interesting is that you can upload your medical data to the system from other services, such as Google Health, or enter details of clinical tests that you may have undergone. Keas will then attempt to provide an interpretation for you and assist you in dealing with possible next steps. This is one of the first sites to pull all of these different elements together to offer you comprehensive advice and guidance.

It sounds simple but in fact this can be a challenging area from a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Many clinicians are reluctant for data to be stored outside their country (and sometimes even outside their offices!) despite the fact that many countries have implemented stringent data privacy regulations. Additionally, providing care plans that are useful, while not crossing the line of delivering medical advice could be quite a challenge.

Keas is backed by a strong management and advisory team, and it will be interesting to see how it delivers over the coming months.

VM 09 @ Earls Court this week brings together many of the key elements driving Cloud Computing with the software and hardwrae vendors discussing their offerings to enable IT to deploy and utilise Cloud based infrastructure.

One of the major tenets of Cloud architectures is the ability to seamlessly deploy workload anywhere within the cloud and to scale available compute resources based on workload demand. Virtualisation is the key element that enables cloud providers to deliver these capabilities to their customers and it is the availability of server hardware with in-built virtualisation support that is the underpinning of these developments.

One of the key considerations when developing virtualisation software ( the hypervisor ) is how to ensure that the guest ( i.e. virtualised ) workloads do not see that they have been virtualised, to do this it is essential that the impact of the hypervisor is minimised.

For some years now Intel has been working with the hypervisor vendors to implement hardware support for virtualisation within their processors. This support is aimed at making it easier for the hypervisor vendors to implement their code and to ensure that they are able to transparently virtualize the guest or hosted workloads.

Intel’s virtualisation technology has focused on 3 key areas – the processor, the I/O subsystem and the network interfaces.

·         Processor enhancements – new instructions and protection model that enables the hypervisor to co-exist with unmodified guest operating systems and to host multiple operating systems on the same hardware. With successive generations of Intel processors new features have been added to the processor to help the hypervisor operate and to reduce its overhead.

·         I/O subsystem – one of the limiters in early virtualisation implementations was the ability to ensure adequate I/O throughput and isolation between various workloads sharing the same physical I/O devices.  Many new Intel Xeon processor based servers now have virtualisation support built into the chipsets.

·         Network interfaces – another challenge with running multiple guest environments on the same server has been the need for them to share the same physical network interfaces and for the hypervisor to manage the separation and distribution of network traffic between the various guest virtual machines. This has been addressed with the latest network interface chips that provide hardware support to manage movement of network data directly between the LAN and virtual machines

It’s also worth noting that raw CPU performance plays a significant part in determining the number of workloads a virtualised server can host. For example if the hypervisor consumes ~10% of the available compute resource, reducing the hypervisor overhead by 10% would result in ~1% more CPU resource being available to the guest workloads, whereas increasing the CPU performance by 10% provides 10% more compute resource to the guest environments – which could equate to 1 or more addition virtual machines being hosted.

When all this is hardware support is put together with the software developments that the hypervisor vendors have been making in terms of tools to dynamically provision and move workload between various physical servers we can start to see how the underpinnings of cloud computing are being put in place.

For further reading there’s lots of good stuff in the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation tracks at the recent IDF, all the materials are here.