English to Russian Bus/Financial Telecom(munications) healthcare cloud

AMID the bustle and hubbub of a busy health-innovation convention, Jeroen Tas, CEO of Healthcare Informatics at Philips in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, removes a plastic pendant from around his neck and begins to explain what it does. It’s a smooth, white, plastic fob about the size of an iPod Nano and looks entirely unassuming. It doesn’t even have a screen – just one button. But this little device has an extraordinary talent: it can put frail, elderly people back in charge of their lives by allowing them to live at home rather than in a hospital or care home.

This wearable device is in the vanguard of a disruptive new technology: cloud-based health monitoring. It is a variant of the internet of things, geared towards human well-being. It contains a miniature mobile phone, an accelerometer and motion-sensing software.It beams data from its sensors to a cloud-computing centre, and if analytics software running in the cloud concludes that the wearer has fallen over, it immediately reports this to hospital-based telehealth staff so that carers and paramedics can be alerted. The wearer can also alert healthcare professionals by pressing the little button, which then starts a two-way voice conversation with the remote team.