American Society of Healthcare Engineers

Hospital Acquired Infections (HAIs) are a rapidly emerging threat to patient and health care worker safety and well-being. Hospitals are addressing HAIs for root causes and it is widely believed that dust particles generated by construction, renovation, and even routine maintenance and cleaning are a source or vector of pathogens. Oberon’s IC Sentinel air quality monitor is a distributed, networked sensor and software suite for generating real-time and long-term air quality metrics in hospitals and healthcare facilities. IC Sentinel provides particulate level, differential room pressure, humidity, and CO2 level metrics related to control of airborne particulates. IC Sentinel also provides sound and light levels which can be associated with patient satisfaction studies.

IC Sentinel is an effective tool for healthcare facilities personnel, infection control coordinators, infection preventionists, and patient satisfaction personnel to monitor , and ultimately control, events which can create undesirable environmental air conditions in the hospital. IC Sentinel is the first distributed, networked sensor with this capability.

The Oberon IC Sentinel environmental air quality monitoring system for hospitals is being introduced this week at the American Society of Healthcare Engineers Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA.

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The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society (Interactive Technologies)

Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for "real time” coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens "text” to each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than a simple technical innovation or social fad, more than just an intrusion on polite society. This book, based on world-wide research involving tens of thousands of interviews and contextual observations, looks into the impact of the phone on our daily lives. The mobile phone has fundamentally affected our accessibility, safety and security, coordination of social and business activities, and use of public places.

Based on research conducted in dozens of countries, this insightful and entertaining book examines the once unexpected interaction between humans and cell phones, and between humans, period. The compelling discussion and projections about the future of the telephone should give designers everywhere a more informed practice and process, and provide researchers with new ideas to last years.

*Rich Ling (an American working in Norway) is a prominent researcher, interviewed in the new technology article in the November 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine.
*A particularly "good read", this book will be important to the designers, information designers, social psychologists, and others who will have an impact on the development of the new third generation of mobile telephones.
*Carefully and wittily written by a senior research scientist at Telenor, Norway's largest telecommunications company, and developer of the first mobile telephone system that allowed for international roaming.

Price: $47.95

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