In many rural or impoverished pockets of the world, doctors are scarce and healthcare facilities are few and far between, leaving large populations of people without the medical resources available to the developed world. Faced with severe resource limitations, medical professionals in these areas struggle to provide adequate healthcare services for their populations, often leaving their youngest at the most risk.<\/p>\n
A lack of electricity, refrigeration and clean drinking water make disease prevention and the delivery of medical resources difficult at best. As a result, these developing nations are often the hardest hit by epidemics, such as last year\u2019s outbreak of the Ebola virus, which was the largest in history and killed over 11,000 people.<\/p>\n
Sadly, preventing future outbreaks and providing adequate preventative care to these populations remains a struggle. To combat these ongoing challenges, healthcare workers in these developing nations are arming themselves with the latest in healthcare technology.<\/p>\n
Mobility is often critical to providing healthcare in these areas. Telemedicine, the use of information and communications technology to deliver healthcare, has made gains in expanding healthcare access worldwide. It enables effective medical care despite understaffed clinics and undertrained practitioners and cuts down on a number of the costs, including travel expenses and patient transfers. Unfortunately, reliable Internet connections required by many of these tools are often not available.<\/p>\n
Cost and portability are other issues involved in delivering medical services to these regions. Several diagnostic tools and medical devices have been re-designed to be portable, disposable or lower-cost to facilitate their use by healthcare workers to do everything from determining the health of a developing fetus to diagnosing deadly viruses, such as Ebola.<\/p>\n
New device keeps newborns healthy<\/strong><\/p>\n Every year more than 6 million children die before the age of five from jaundice, an easily treatable illness. Nearly 10 percent of all newborns worldwide require treatment to prevent death or long-term disability, which involves the use of phototherapy, shining a blue light on babies\u2019 skin.<\/p>\n