Unfortunately, pain remains a "sensation" that medical science is still unable to measure. The best they can do is ask the patient (via a scale of 1 to 10). Maybe some day...

Oops, forgot to include "Get Well, Martin".

During the early seventies, while in college, I worked as a lab assistant in a San Francisco hospital. It was not uncommon for the lab techs to draw my blood when I came in to work for the evening shift. I remember a time when, after being tested, I had to go to all the floors and pull the blood test records for that day because according to my blood test results, I was either dead or in a coma. I am sure that today hospital calibration procedures are far better than what they were when I was in college. Get well quickly. By the way, I am color blind and your verification system is a problem. I am guessing at the colors.

I'm color blind too. Because of that, I usually specify the colors we use in my graphs in the print magazine. I never use red and green traces in the same graph because I can't tell them apart. I often use blue and red or I request that our art department use solid and dashed lines. Here's a problem though. If you post a comment, you may be asked the color of a letter. Right now, the system is asking me for just that. Let's see. The second letter is black and the third letter is blue. But, the system wants the color of the first letter. I'll have to ask someone if it's green or red. Naomi, our assistant managing editor, says it's green.

Hello Martin, It seems that you discovered a new world of T&M... And the answer is yes, there are test and simulation tools in this area as well. Fluke Biomedical is the world leader in this area. We offer ECG simulators that include temperature body, Invasive Blood Pressure and Cardiac Output (how much flow rate is the heart pumping) simulations. All made of electronic simulations. There are also Non-Invasive Blood Pressure simulators and SpO2 (oxymetry) simulation. The last one is a kind of artificial finger able to simulate various healthy or pathologic patient. For ventilators we have Gas Flow Analyzers and Test Lungs. For defibrillators we have Defibrillator Analyzers measuring the Energy delivered to the patient chest (up to 3500V and 60A !) and able to simulate a cardiac arrest converted to normal by a defib shock. For Electrosurgical Units (knifes), we have Electrosurgical Analyzers to qualify the main parameters of the (relatively) high frequency signal generated by those devices when cutting and coagulating flesh and vessels. The people in charge with those Medical Electronic Equipements are the Biomedical Technicians (or Clinical Technicians). For CTs, MRI devices and Linear Accelerators (used to treat cancer with high dose of radiations) we have another branch with a wide portfolio including measuring devices and phantoms mimicking tissues and human body. Most of our instruments are traceable to NIST. To protect personal data there are very special communication protocols used in hospitals, especially in the USA. I guess that's why you could not use read your professional e-mails. The picture is quite different in Europe about this, but I'm not a network specialist. But for sure wireless networks will spread in hospitals soon. Here is a warning, if you investigate more this area you may be cautious: once you "fell" in the medical field you stay there for the rest of your professional life. It's so interesting... I hope you feel better now.