Raspberry Pi Roundup - 20th March 2016

Telehealth

The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) which provides information, data and IT systems for health and social care organisations, including the NHS, is about to launch a telehealth pilot scheme which uses a Raspberry Pi to gather information about patients. The system is called MediPi and uses a 7 inch touch-screen tablet plus equipment including a blood pressure cuff, a finger oximeter and diagnostic scales. The device costs around £250, including the Pi, and is due to be used by an unnamed NHS trust in the next financial year. Richard Robinson is a technical integration specialist at the HSCIS and he came up with the idea after his wife returned home with equipment that would do a similar job, but which was much more expensive. He set about proving that it could be done on a budget and used JavaFX to develop a tile-based user interface. This means that the system is platform agnostic, although the Britishness (and cheapness) of the Pi is what drew him to use it. The device feeds back data to the NHS spine via a wired or wireless network connection. You can read the full story over at Computer Weekly and you can delve into more technical detail at OpusVL. Richard’s own handout for the project is available on SlideShare.

Touchscreen cases

By now, everyone knows about the Official Raspberry Pi 7″ touchscreen. Not everyone, however, knows about the various case options that are available. So, over on my blog, I decided to take you through the options that are available, and one that is not yet available. Read about the cases here.

Sniffer

Here’s a nice little tutorial from Dexter Industries. In it, they use a Raspberry Pi, their GrovePi add-on board, an LCD screen and a buzzer to create a system that will alert you when an open wifi network is found. Please note: this pushes the bounds of legality a little bit, but (as the tutorial says) as long as you find the network and don’t use it without permission, you’re fine. Read it and get the code here.

Spotfiy/Slack

Oklahoma-based Aaron Krauss works at Staplegun where they have just moved floors to an open-plan office. They had a sound system installed but no easy way to control it as the hub was in their server room (which was nowhere near where they are located). Enter the Raspberry Pi. Using Node and a Spotify library, together with a premium Slack account (for access to the API), Aaron created a system which would monitor Slack and then control what was played through the sound system according to the commands users sent. Pretty nifty! You can read more about how it was done on Aaron’s blog.