Hello, my name is Tony Frisby and I'm a gadget freak. Mostly technology toys, but since this will be on the record, I may as well confess that my basement has an above average number of discarded kitchen gadgets. I'll also confess to reading - a lot. Books, magazines, articles folks send me they think I'll find interesting. I read like it's an addiction someone's going to take away from me. And unlike a lot of people, it doesn't matter if its print or on my laptop or my PDA. With that confession in mind, I've found a new favorite application for my PalmOS PDA.
CogniQ is a new application for PalmOS (and soon PocketPC users) that allows publishers to make content available from both a clinical or evidence-based medicine perspective, and a table of contents or browsing perspective.
I know, you're thinking this isn't new. AvantGo has been doing this for years. You're right, and I use AvantGo every day too, but this is considerably different.
Different how? The CogniQ platform combines the handheld's convenience, with the desktop's larger screen and printing option. A huge benefit for those of you who don't like to read from your handheld Ð or even your PC. Using your PDA you can discover new articles in your favorite journals by browsing their tables of contents. See an article title that sounds interesting? If the publisher made an abstract available (and most do) you can click on the note icon and review it. Like the abstract? Flag the article and the next time you sync, the article is added to your CogniQ library.
You access your CogniQ library on the web. You can see a list of the articles you've flagged. You can sort them into your own custom folders, and you can either read them online, or print them. Often they're available in a PDF format - a favorite of many JEFFLINE users.
The other perspective I mentioned was viewing things from a clinical angle. The folks at Unbound Medicine (creators of the CogniQ program) have partnered with BMJ, publishers of Clinical Evidence, to bring evidence-based medical information to your handheld. Information is sorted into populations or diagnoses (men's health, women's health, cardiovascular disorders, skin disorders) and then within categories, like men's health, you find topics such as benign prostatic hyperplasia, prostate cancer, etc. That topic links to a review of clinical practice studies and summarizes the findings those studies reported.
There is a free, six-month trial of the software available if you would like to see what its like for yourself. Give it a try and let me know what you think. AISR is investigating a few different alternatives for providing handheld access to our databases and the electronic journals. If we test pilot another tool I'll share information on that as well.
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