Power to the portables.
Portable computing devices generally are classified into four categories: laptop, palmtop, notebook, and pen-based computers. If a portable unit weighs over eight pounds, call it a laptop. If a stylus is used to input data, call it pen-based or a pen computer. Palmtops frequently are electronic organizers or resources: Sharp's Wizard line stores appointments and addresses; Franklin's Med-Spell contains Stedman's medical dictionary. Notebooks often incorporate a QWERT keyboard, and sometimes include a pointing device. NEC's notebooks in 1988 were the first sub-laptop computers. According to a 1992 report from Market Intelligence Research Corp., Mountain View, Calif., 4.6 million sub-laptops were sold in 1991 for $2.6 billion. By 1998 the market may reach $25 billion. The report predicts that one sub-category of pen computers, which are designed to be held in one hand while information is input with a pen-like stylus, will prove most useful to the health-care industry. Pen tablets, as opposed to pen clipboards, use faster, more expensive processors, store more data, and "are expected to allow [caregivers] to carry full patient charting with them ... and allow information to be recorded directly to patient files." Sub-laptops are on-line in many healthcare facilities: Greenwich hospital, Stanford University Medical Clinic, Humana Hospital Audubon, Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center, and others.
Greenwich Hospital, Yale University School of Medicine, CT.
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