Photo from OpusVL

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) which provides information, data and IT systems for health and social care organisations, including the NHS, is about to launch a telehealth pilot scheme which uses a Raspberry Pi to gather information about patients. The system is called MediPi and uses a 7 inch touch-screen tablet plus equipment including a blood pressure cuff, a finger oximeter and diagnostic scales. The device costs around £250, including the Pi, and is due to be used by an unnamed NHS trust in the next financial year. Richard Robinson is a technical integration specialist at the HSCIS and he came up with the idea after his wife returned home with equipment that would do a similar job, but which was much more expensive. He set about proving that it could be done on a budget and used JavaFX to develop a tile-based user interface. This means that the system is platform agnostic, although the Britishness (and cheapness) of the Pi is what drew him to use it. The device feeds back data to the NHS spine via a wired or wireless network connection. You can read the full story over at Computer Weekly and you can delve into more technical detail at OpusVL. Richard’s own handout for the project is available on SlideShare. UPDATE: All the code and technical specs are available on GitHub.