文档介绍：考研英语阅读理解精读100篇之信息技术类
阅读理解精选100篇---信息技术类
考研英语阅读理解精读100篇unit31
Unit 31
Valeta Young, 81, a retiree from Lodi, Calif., suffers from congestive heart failure and requires almost constant monitoring. But she doesn't have to drive anywhere to get it. Twice a day she steps onto a special electronic scale, answers a few yes or no questions via push buttons on a small attached monitor and presses a button that sends the information to a nurse's station in San Antonio, Texas. "It's almost a direct link to my doctor," says Young, who describes herself puter illiterate but says she has no problems using the equipment.
Young is not the only patient who is dealing with her doctor from a distance. Remote monitoring is a rapidly growing field in medical technology, with more than 25 peting to measure remotely--and transmit by phone, or through the airwaves--everything from patients' heart rates to how often they cough.
Prompted both by the rise in health-care costs and the puterization of health-care equipment, doctors are using remote monitoring to track a widening variety of chronic diseases. In March, St. Francis University in Pittsburgh, Pa., partnered with pany called BodyMedia on a study in which rural diabetes patients use wireless glucose meters and armband sensors to monitor their disease. And last fall, Yahoo began offering subscribers the ability to chart their asthma conditions online, using a PDA-size respiratory monitor that measures lung functions in real time and e-mails the data directly to doctors.
Such home monitoring, says Dr. e Dailey, a physician at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego, "could someday replace less productive ways that patients track changes in their heart rate, blood sugar, lipid levels, kidney functions and even vision."
Dr. Timothy Moore, executive vice president of Alere Medical, which produces the smart scales that Young and more than 10,000 other patients are using, says that almost any vital sign could, in theory, be monitored from