After attending Comdex in Las Vegas for over 5 years I have a feeling about the impact of the event and how the products that are introduced are likely to appear in the following year. Attendees are easily sucked into the "event" as an ad for coming products but this is far from the truth. Although many of the manufacturers and companies who appear there try to convince you about the value of some software and hardware, that is a false presumption. Other manufacturers use this as another opportunity to show new or about-to-be-released products. I can see some trends and these come as no surprise to anyone reading newspapers and technical literature.

Where two years ago you could hardly find an ear without a small phone attached, you see much of that miniaturization continuing with telephones with added features, pagers, PDAs, and media players to name a few.

One nice technology that will definitely have medical application in the future will be the Tablet PC shown by Bill Gates during his keynote address. Although Fujitsu and other manufacturers have been showing these devices for some years they have been heavy, expensive, and only a few proprietary applications have been written for them. With Microsoft onboard writing the operating system and with the success of the Palm PDA these tools will take off if the price range is lowered (early predictions are that these devices will be expensive) and we can bring off-the-shelf applications. This one is about 2 years away but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear lots of promotional talk much earlier.

Every Comdex seems to have some strong themes and on major one was a wireless technology. Almost everyone had something to say about applications and hardware that worked wirelessly. Bluetooth (short-range radio in active development since 1998) technology was one major name being touted but those devices were only promoted – realistic roll out is in 2002. It has many advantages over infrared for moving and out of site connections for the mobile user. Some people had working products with cell phones as the primary example but most are in development now.

Wireless and the Internet was much talked about with some advocating that portable devices would connect to the Web soon. Since wireless use is exploding around the world, we can expect many products arriving sooner-than-later. Europe and Asia have reached substantial penetration in those markets.

Linux has grown so much in its presence as an operating system that a large section of the Sands Hotel exhibit area was devoted to its application in the business world. There is a great likelihood that there will be more use in the Medical enterprise but I spent little time there. More programmers are following this trend and so I expect some vendors will approach us in the near future. Palm and Microsoft won’t be the only folks writing the portable operating system because vendors were discussing Linux as an alternative for the PDA and pen tablets. The fastest growth of Linux is in the foreign markets because of the decreased cost to develop in a more budget conscious regions of the world like third world countries.

I was very impressed with the latest upgrade to Novell Groupwise, which will allow some security feature add-on. These add-on have the potential to dramatic change the way we interact with our computers and other remote devices on a network or over the Internet.

Last year I saw the first earnest efforts to use video devices to read the iris of the eye as the definitive security marker like our fingerprints. About 5 vendors were showing early prototypes of these devices in 1999. This year about 30-40 vendors were showing working products for sale. These included keyboard scanners for your thumbprint or stand-alone that worked with NT through serial or a USB port (special drivers were written). There were various types of video cameras for scanning the face or eye for facial features or iris recognition. There were microphones for voice identification and some vendors employed all these technologies into a multi-featured approach to security. The potential to eliminate or dramatically reduce our log on hassle and insure security was obvious to me. Although we would not eliminate passwords we should be able to reduce the issue to a dribble. I can’t wait to try one at home or my office.

There were many examples of technology changes from new processors to more sophisticated electronic products of many kinds that will change the way work in medicine. This was the short list of items I was impressed with but I had 3 full days to review many new technologies and thought this year’s Comdex was worthwhile.

Mark