Hewlett-Packard Co was once a medical and laboratory instruments company that diversified into computers in a small way in the 1960s – but these days, digital methods are so pervasive that the computer side is threatening to subsume all the activities of the medical and instrumentation sides. Latest example is a variant of the HP 200LX palm-top computer designed to enable doctors to receive patients’ electrocardiograms, blood pressure and other vital signs for remote diagnosis in emergencies. Announced yesterday, the Palmvue system consists of a Vectra personal computer with a modem to act as a despatch station for medical data collected from Hewlett-Packard patient monitors in the hospital. The modem sends wireless data on paging networks for reception on the palmtop. It costs $25,000 for the despatch station, LaserJet 4L printer, software to link the medical monitors to the station and five HP 200LXes.
