Potentially deadly mathematical errors are prevalent among mobile applications used in clinical and emergency room settings, but a team of researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Ying Wu College of Computing has found provable solutions that may save lives.
The applications, known as medical score calculators, can be downloaded by anyone and are popular among less experienced health care staff. But the apps are rife with errors, sometimes because of flawed source data from medical reference tables and other times due to bad implementations from developers who don’t understand the science. Examples of scores used for early warning, intensive care units and triage include HEART (history, EKG, age, risk, troponin), PAS (pulmonary asthma score) and SOFA (sepsis-related organ failure assessment).
Computer science professor Iulian Neamtiu, overseeing graduate students Sydur Rahaman and Raina Samuel who now work for Google and Montclair State University, respectively, said they began finding such errors several years ago during wider work on event-based mobile applications. To read the full story.