Pictures of the Future Spring 2006
Patents and Innovations
Better Signals for Cells / A Healthy Dose of Data
A Healthy Dose of Data
Inventor Bharat Rao's program intelligently gathers medical data and helps to improve patient treatment
Inventor Bharat Rao of Siemens Medical Solutions in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has developed an information system that provides doctors with treatment recommendations for patients with cardiovascular diseases. The system makes health care more efficient while reducing costs. Medical data often is only available in hard-to-read formats and is scattered at various locations. And hospitals often have very different styles of organizing and structuring this information. Rao's solution, called "Remind," gathers patient data from different sources, automatically compares it and generates an optimized data file. The program created by Rao—a Siemens Inventor of the Year in 2005—gathers information from sources including prescriptions, lab reports and hand-written notes. Equally suitable for use in small practices and large hospitals, Remind (Reliable Extraction and Meaningful Inference from Nonstructured Data) makes therapeutic recommendations to the physician, permitting faster and better treatment at lower cost. The data also is accessible in anonymous form, making it invaluable for use in research and quality management. The system is already being used with the records of five million patients in the U.S. Although designed for the U.S. health care system, Remind can be configured for use elsewhere.
Better Signals for Cells
Li Hui has developed a technique that improves transmission quality and results in higher capacity in UMTS networks
Researchers from Siemens Corporate Technology in Beijing have improved the efficiency of UMTS mobile communications technology. Now a network can serve more mobile phones without needing more transmitting power. The solution also reduces disturbing interference at the boundary zones between mobile phone cells—for example, the interference that arises when a car radio receives signals from two stations with the same frequency. With UMTS, the interference is remedied by ensuring that every mobile phone in a radio cell is identified with a unique code. A large number of users, however, can strain the capacity of this process—a problem that Dr. Li Hui, a Siemens Inventor of the Year in 2005, has solved by combining two methods. One calls for splitting up the carrier frequencies into smaller units. This OFDM process (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) provides optimal protection for the signal against interference such as echoes caused by reflections from buildings. And instead of using one powerful antenna in the center of the cell, Li distributes many low-power antennas uniformly throughout the cell. This allows improved coverage with less transmission power, while also ensuring that interference is eliminated through dynamic allocation of the signals.