Well, blogging has proven to be difficult. Simply too busy to get here on a regular basis. But I did just receive word that Microsoft Research has awarded us another grant to do a deployment with DMD patients and their families through the Washington University in St. Louis Medical School. This will be over the next year and will be our first clinical trial of our smartphone-based systems. Should be an interesting year.

It's here... the SDK has been released. Source code as well as binaries.

This is still beta code in every sense so there may be many updates to fix bugs and maybe even to add functionality, but it's there for all to see. Just don't laugh at it (at least not in front of me).

Been too busy to post (I know, a true blogger would never say that). I am happy to release the first public version of our application on SourceForge.net. See the main page for links. Right now, it's only a binary with some sample cine files, but source code should be posted by the end of the month.

Many things have been going on so it's been hard to sit down and write about them.

1. ) I just received a rugged hand held Windows Mobile device from Trimble. It's a very nice package for field use (first-responders, military, etc.). Much larger than a cell phone, but easy to use touch screen and it's a beautiful screen.
2. ) We were asked to be on CNBC Street Smarts on May 13. Dave Richard will be there, live, to talk about our technology and business opportunities around it.
3. ) We've been contacted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and will be giving them lots of information for an article, as well.
4. ) I've been spending a lot of time cleaning up my code and making it more stable. Funny, the hard stuff that is the hardware interface seems rock-solid. The things that break are the .NET user interface things because I'm new to that and still learning my way around. It's turning out to be quite powerful, however.

OK, too busy coding to write anything, of late. I just completed V2 of the software where I completely rewrite the image display portion to support much more functionality. I've released V2 into the wild by shipping a probe and phone to a colleague at Microsoft for demos. The current software (while definitely demo software!) has the following features:

• Live imaging (with any of several probes)
• save/load cine files
• save .bs files with a jpeg image
• image controls (gain/lut)
• scan speed control
• "hi-res" playback (interpolation may be turned on for playback)
• "send" command for sending the current cine via email to a remote site

Washington University in St. Louis has released a press release that's making it way around the Internet. We also have been interviewed for a few newspapers and magazines. More information on those when there is something to point at. The press release is here.

You can watch the video showing some neat, low-cost, medical solutions here. Our phone system is the second part of the short video.

I'm currently at the 6th Annual World Health Care Congress in Washington D.C. Today, I met with Dr. Yunus, and others who are very excited about low-cost, highly portable and networkable ultrasound equipment. The cell phone is a perfect platform for them, it seems.

I was interviewed by NBC and here is an initial link to that story. I was also interviewed by the local NPR radio people at WAMU.

We will be presenting our cell-phone and low-cost probe technology at the 2009 World Health Care Congress in Washington D.C. from April 14-16. This was by invitation of Microsoft and is a wonderful opportunity to get the word out about this exciting, new technology. This will be a poster session at which we will also be demoing our hardware.

I'm continually frustrated by the handset manufacturers and carriers who disable perfectly good functions in their phones for no good reason (except to feel superior, themselves, and lock people out of doing useful things with these devices). What specifically good purpose can come from disallowing users of phones (for which they may have paid hundreds of dollars even after rebates, incentives, etc.) to plug in their USB flash drives to transfer documents, music, videos, etc.? And why do the manufacturers of the chipsets that support these functions not allow anyone but "licensed" users of their products any information on the products so that we, the people who spent the money to buy them, can enable those features so we can not only read our flash drives but to possibly save lives by using the phones as an ultrasound scanner?

I'm happy to sign NDAs or license products so I can do this work but nobody seems to care. I can't even get responses to my inquiries any longer from these companies. The send me standard "see our website and if it's not there, you can't have it" emails and then pretend I don't exist. Had IBM done this back in 1981, I'd be blogging from an Apple computer - yes, Apple still does this to some extent and you can see how much it helps them!

I'm ready to buy thousands of handsets from someone who can support USB host functionality. Others will follow me. Why does nobody care or want to do this? Answers, please... I know, I'll be ignored.

The blog is now enabled! We hope to post interesting news as it happens...

Recently, we had a few interesting things happen:

1. I found that a Palm Treo 800w does, indeed, have a USB host port so it can be used with our ultrasound probes. This is very nice as it means that not only is there a modern phone that's still for sale able to use our probes, but the phone I carry every day can do it.
2. I have a new driver that shows signs of improving our data throughput. I'm still debugging, but it's promising.
3. Microsoft wants to do a longer article about our probes for an upcoming booklet... more data, later.