In this article I plan to take you on a tour of "Physik's Library" - my own collection of online medical resources that now lives on a 128 MB CompactFlash card which I swap between my Psion 5MX and Psion 7 depending on what I'm up to.
Physik's
EPOC Pages - Physik's Library
My favourite medical application of a PDA is for carrying clinical and academic reference materials. Until now this would usually require such items to be specifically-written for a particular PDA platform. That's fine if your using either Palm or Pocket PC machines and don't mind paying rather high prices. However, if you're a Psion-user then you should have the hardware capabilities to use a number of freely-available online medical resources instead.
In this article I plan to take you on a tour of "Physik's Library" - my own collection of online medical resources that now lives on a 128 MB CompactFlash card which I swap between my Psion 5MX and Psion 7 depending on what I'm up to.
Let's start with something that should be familiar to most people in the USA at least. Personally, I've always been a big fan of the Merck Manual, although here in the UK it remains relatively unknown. Its extensive, yet concise and well-structured approach, make it a good choice for use on handheld computers and versions already exist for both Palm and Pocket PC machines. However, I would personally much rather read this sort of text on something with a larger screen.
The online version of the Merck Manual (www.merck.com/pubs/mmanual/sections.htm) is excellent and one of only a few successful examples of how to put a textbook online (IMHO). It's designed for a 640-pixel screen width with all the key navigation links wisely placed towards the top of each page. It manages perfectly well without the use of frames or Javascript, which seem to get used all too often in online textbooks these days. (Personally, I find that such "enhancements" add little in terms of easier navigation and certainly slow things down, as well as making the data unsuitable for handheld viewing.)
Series 5MX Screenshot
Series 7 Screenshot
So the online Merck Manual seems to be an excellent candidate for use as an offline textbook on either a Psion 5MX or Psion 7. I initially thought that the best way to get hold of the necessary data would be by purchasing the Merck Manual on CD-ROM - provided that this was written in a similar format to the online version. However, I could find few details about this product online and my enquiries met with no response. (I did later receive an email from the distributors of the handheld versions of the Merck Manual, but their only suggestion was that I change the handheld platform I was using !)
Hence my attention turned again to the online version and I made plans to download it for offline browsing. Obviously, I checked with the Merck copyright people to make sure this was legal to do for personal use and they agreed that it was :o) With my chosen downloader program the initial result came to 90 MB which I was able to edit down to 60 MB (30 MB text + 30 MB images) on my desktop computer. Finally, I used my new CompactFlash reader/writer to transfer the files to a suitably large CompactFlash card.
Series 5MX Screenshot
Series 7 Screenshot
So I now have something identical to the online Merck Manual which I can run very nicely on either a Psion 5MX or a Psion 7. If I ever get hold of one of those 640-width Windows CE devices, then I'll let you know whether it works on that too. If only more people designed their online / electronic resources with handheld formats in mind. (Even Merck's other online textbooks are less suitable for use in the way I've described.) Fortunately, plenty of other online medical resources do work well on the Psion machines and I'll say more about these is due course.
... to be continued ...
