I recently had an interview with Aswin Aristama, a photonics graduate from Algonquin College, about his work on a project known as ROMOBS (Remote objective monitoring of bio-signals). The project's goal is to create a device that monitors a patient's vital signs -- like heartrate, blood pressure, etc. -- even when the patient isn't necessarily in a hospital. In other words they want to create a mobile monitoring device that uses wireless technology to transmit a patient's readings to a remote location where a supervising physician can review the information and then advise the patient if any of the readings are not as they should be.

The project offers exciting possibilities for critically ill patients who would otherwise be confined to a hospital bed. With this kind of technology the patient can go about living a close to normal life, so long as they carry around the tentatively -- and even Aristama was quick to admit -- uncreatively named "ROMOBS device".

The device works by communicating a patient's vital signs via Blue Tooth technology to a cell phone which it has been linked with. With programming done by Aristama, the cell phone then sends the signal through its company's existing wireless communications network to an assigned doctor monitoring the patient.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College and a manufacturing company charged with creating the hardware. Currently, ROMOBS is nearing the end of its first year of work, and is scheduled to take three years to complete.

Aristama's job in this was to program the ROMOBS device and design an application for cell phones that allows patients to both see their bio-signals and to send them off to their doctor.

Aristama and the team's work has payed off so far, having won awards from the IEEE of eastern and central Ontario.

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Exciting news from the world of photonics! Which as a matter-of-fact may not be a bad field to go into. Aristama told me that he believes photonics will be an incredibly important field soon. The 3 dimensional TVs we've been hearing about will require a lot of work from scientists with photonic's backgrounds