Category: Technology News

Medical care facilities have expressed apprehension over risks associated with smartphone cybersecurity.

Hospital mobile security is a concern with increasing priority in medical facilities. The use of mobile technology has made it possible to enjoy many meaningful advantages in hospitals. Nurses can communicate more quickly, care team members – including doctors – can communicate more effectively, care can be more effectively coordinated, and workflows are more efficient.

That said, this platform may be convenient and helpful, but it opens system to cybersecurity risks.

A survey of 100 hospital IT and informatics executives by Spyglass Consulting Group provided insight on this topic. The firm is located in Menlo Park, California and specializes in market research and consultancy. The participants provided a solid representation of the 2,500 hospitals across the United States with over 200 beds. The research looked into hospital mobile security with in-house technology. It examined the level of protection and concern in place. The protection was regarding patient data, the mobile devices themselves and the technology infrastructure of the hospitals.

The research revealed that hospital mobile security is a large concern despite the benefits of the tech.

Managing director and founder of Spyglass, Gregg Malkary, said “Smartphone technology has really taken on a serious role as to how it fits into clinical communication, but every time you integrate systems, there are points where the data is in the clear, and where it is vulnerable.”

The mobile security survey examined the way connected devices such as tablets and smartphones could place a hospital’s IT infrastructure and network at risk of cyberattack. Attacks included: malware, blastware and ransomware. It took into account both devices personally owned by medical practitioners and devices owned and managed by the hospitals themselves.

The survey showed the largest concerns and issues in hospital mobile security. Personally owned devices commonly contained inadequate password protection. Furthermore, they were not satisfactorily protected with security software. They typically relied on SMS messaging that was not secured in order to communicate with other clinic team members. Many of those communications included sharing patient health information. This exposed that information to access by unintended recipients.

You may be able to use your smartphone for double the time as early as 2017 with new tech.

Smartphone tech is moving forward at a lightning speed but mobile battery technology has not managed to keep up. Our phones are an increasingly important and central part of our daily lives. For this reason, they are becoming faster, more powerful and with higher resolution displays. Those features require energy.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy they require is too much for the average smartphone battery life.

Among the main struggles faced by smartphone owners is the need for a better phone battery. Mobile battery technology is falling short of an average user’s usage requirements. As smartphones become more awesome, they are consuming a larger amount of juice in a smaller amount of time. The phone lithium-ion batteries have not increased in capacity at the same rate as phones have increased in need.

However, new technology under development by SolidEnergy Systems may have the potential to change that. The company has been focused on improving drone battery life, but this tech could also have other applications – smartphones, for example.

This mobile battery technology uses lithium metal foil anodes instead of using graphite.

The foil makes a considerable difference. Today’s mobile battery graphite anodes are considerably thicker. In fact, the foil is only 20 percent the thickness of the anodes made from graphite. This is important because it gives batteries more physical space for improving capacity.

SolidEnergy CEO Qichao Hu said this difference will let tomorrow’s batteries hold twice the capacity. Said simply: batteries will be able to fit much more power into the same amount of space. Hu explained that this means twice the capacity in the same physical size battery or the same capacity in a half-size battery.

Moreover, SolidEnergy isn’t just working on a concept anymore. Its prototype battery was unveiled last year. At that time, the prototype was already half the physical size of the battery in an iPhone 6. Yet, it had a 2.0 amp hours capacity. The iPhone 6 battery has a 1.8 amp hours capacity. Therefore, in half the physical space, the mobile battery technology already offered more than twice the capacity.