Effect of Tablet Devices on Social Interactions

Use of Tablets in the Medical Industry

Another area in which tablets have generated interest is the health sector. There are various ways in which tablets can potentially become a positive force in the industry, whether through being used as a teaching aid for medical students or being used to supplement nurses’ and doctors’ knowledge as they interact with patients. Recently the medical industry became the third largest sector to adopt tablets, suggesting they are becoming an important part of medical practices.

As with tablets in education, iPad have been adopted by doctors in a pilot program in a hospital in Milwaukee. The program hopes that the devices will have a positive effect on social interactions between doctors and patients, allowing doctors, for example, to display test results and graphs directly to their patients. The iPads can also be used to improve efficiency, to keep clinical logs, or to record patient data directly, rather than writing data down and entering it into a laptop or desktop later on.

Not all medical employees see the iPad as a major force in the future of medicine, but the main issues are in the current design of the iPad. For example, iPads are not necessarily made to be roughly handled, but nurses or doctors may require a more durable device. iPads also can’t necessarily be easily disinfected, which would be necessary in a hospital setting. Apple’s closed-source software also presents a problem when medical software needs to be run on a tablet but is incompatible with the current iOS system.

All the same, these issues may be resolved in future versions of the iPad, and tablets may become a pervasive device among doctors, nurses, and medical students. Their power in making available patients’ information to doctors, and making easily accessible to patients information about medical topics, is their central attraction in the healthcare industry. Since they can be carried into the hospital room itself, we may find that tablets will become more incorporated in everyday medical visits, affecting in another way how we interact with each other.

The Future

Tablets may have arrived permanently, or they may be soon replaced by another technology. Their benefits in making information available at hand and at all times may benefit many people in many disparate fields, or they may be harmful to the way that people normally socially interact. It is impossible to know yet exactly what their effect will be, since tablets are mostly such a new technology, and many people are still experimenting with their use. If they persist, the information made available by tablets, and the presence of the tablets themselves, will undoubtedly have a deep effect on our social interactions in real life.

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