At 7 p.m. on a Saturday in April, Marc Schiffman, still in hospital scrubs, was standing in line to pay for a few children’s walkie-talkie sets at a Target in Harlem. Customers around the store began to clap in honor of healthcare workers, a new custom of the COVID-19 era. Customers approached Schiffman to thank him for his service and ushered him to the front of the checkout line.
The walkie-talkies, originally designed for kids by a company called Relay, were for patients. Schiffman and his colleague Tamantha Fenster, an obstetrician and gynecologist at New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medicine, were trying to devise a low-cost way for families of COVID-19 patients to communicate with their loved ones in intensive care. Video chat was proving to be too depressing for families and too time-intensive for nurses. Walkie-talkies had the potential benefit of letting family members talk to a patient whenever they wanted without the help of a nurse.
“It’s basically a speaker that…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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