41–50 of 72 posts
Philips is offering the Lumify at $199/mo https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/ The device is used with a mobile and is portable anywhere. I found it has an excellent value-proposition and potentially revolutionizing the space
I can understand why, when you're dealing with human lives, you wouldn't want anything but the best. But that wasn't the use case of the original article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a hardware engineer and might be able to explain a bit. Industrial electronics doesn't seem to move at the same pace as consumer electronics from the outside, but there often is incredible progress at the same pace and perhaps faster than the consumer segments. It is often hard to discern to the outsider, because they lack domain knowledge to recognize these advancements. On top of this, in certain fields, costs…
For me its the same as pharma. Can you tell me if a government (ex India) would like to devote resources to make cheaper ultrassounds they wouldn't be able to? I only buy non-technical arguments, unless the bill of materials is on the same order as the price of the equipment.
Actually, depending on your precise definition of "same order", I could argue it already is. And while the gross margin will seem high if you are only used to consumer stuff, this is an almost useless metric for low volumes, where the net margin do not necessarily follow.
There are also not a ton of different vendors, so even dreaming about mutualizing some R&D costs (and that will mostly not happen), you would not save a lot.
Once again, cheap portable machines (but not able to do a lot) already exists.
This kind of description can be made of any hardware piece. We came from a whole room, slow computer to an iPhone that can make billions of operations per second. I see the previous post as complaining about this not happening on the industry. Of course making an iPhone (or a OnePlus phone if you want to get into low-scale) is not easy, but the technology has advanced and standardized enough to be considered "cheap"…
I came here to make exactly the same argument. Or cars, if we pick something that also needs certifying (from a purely manufacturing perspective). I get that most people would rather have a car, so more cars get made, so they're cheaper. (Athough roughly comparable, and there's different models. To me, it seems a car is more complicated than an ultra-sound system). The author of the original article made a good point…
Now the definition of "complicated" can be subject to debate, but you could be surprised if you compare the production prices of simple/high-end cars and simple/high-end ultrasound systems.
Really high volumes help a lot for all components. There are more and more components in ultrasound system that can be reused OTS from other markets, but even then, those larger markets are not necessarily larger than the cars market!
And it is not too dangerous to build one yourself for non-medical use, although it might be a little harder than you seem to think. But if you are reasonably skilled, I believe it is doable to design a toy system reasonably cheaply (but simply, do not expect to be able to use a raspberry pi GPIO and obtain something non-shitty). Go on if you want!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars, iphones and laptops are sold in quantities that are magnitudes larger than ultrasounds. Even if every school bought one for students to experiment with, you'd still only have all schools and doctors in the world as potential market. On top of that, medical devices are supposed to work in comparatively harsh environments (strong disinfectants etc.) for a long long time. Iphone lifetimes are measured in years, no…
... but the "magnitudes larger" that they are sold is also endogenous to the regulatory framework around them. Suppose you had to get a PhD in physics to be able to get a drivers license. All of a sudden we would see a lot fewer buying -- and therefore far fewer people selling -- cars since it is so expensive to actually be able to drive them. With these ultrasounds, there is such a heavy regulatory framework at work…
This is a great post, thanks for writing and sharing. I'm a biomedical engineer and found both posts interesting. There are really exciting things happening right now where the murky area between expensive, slow medtech and fast-moving, lower cost consumer products are being explored. There have been some specatular implosions of approaches straying to far towards the consumer tech-startup approach. Like most things,…
I trust the current post on the physics and EE side of things. That said I'm also very curious about the computer graphics side nowadays. It seems to me that historically, most of the complexity was handled through sophisticated mathematical abstractions at the material level, making the research very costly. How much post processing can be done to infer more information from less costly inputs (I'm thinking ideas li…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
e.g. the LM96530 is lifebuy, so it's basically discontinued. LM96511 & LM96570: not recommended for new design. In other words, those ICs are basically obsolete.
Thanks for pointing out right to the important thing: Those ICs are not new, they are on the market since some years.
Philips is offering the Lumify at $199/mo https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/ The device is used with a mobile and is portable anywhere. I found it has an excellent value-proposition and potentially revolutionizing the space
The fallacy this author makes in his response is unfortunately very symptomatic of our society's poor grasp of fundamental economic principles. Worth noting that despite failing to see some of the larger forces at work that the previous post mentioned the author nevertheless acts condescendingly towards that other post, which is also very similar to how society-at-large operates. The one factor the author completely…
Philips is offering the Lumify at $199/mo https://www.lumify.philips.com/web/ The device is used with a mobile and is portable anywhere. I found it has an excellent value-proposition and potentially revolutionizing the space
How does it compare to the ultrasound machines found in hospitals? (if that question even makes sense)