Pediatric PDA Blog

NICUtools.org, a website that sports a collection of highly specialized neonatal calculators and clinical scores has recently produced a Palm version of their calculators.

Because there’s no Windows Mobile version we used Style Tap to import the Palm software into Windows Mobile and here’s how it looked;

Some of the calculators like the congenital diaphragmatic hernia risk assessment and the Nitric Oxide delivery are actually neonatal calculators that are unique and not available on any other PDA calculators.

These calculators are all free online when we go to the website but unfortunately if the site is visited via mobile browser then the pages look awkward and bizarre and therefore we have to buy the PDA version. If you are thinking to visit to the website on your iPhone’s Safari, Don’t even try because they explicitly mention that their web based calcs are not compatible with Safari.

The collection of these calculators and tools is highly specific to the NICU and very handy to the neonatologist. The interface, being a Palm interface, is super fast and no problems encountered in the navigation or the calculation results.

The calculators and tools are based on the best evidence based algorithms drawn from the current literature and a full explanation and references of each calculator is mentioned with each calculator on the NICUTools website.

However, the app can be enormously improved if they consider the following points:

• More calculators needed, at least an APGAR score and TPN. The missing baby check calculator which is available online but not on the PDA version will not be added in future versions because of copyright issues.
• Adding Lbs weight units in addition to Kgs could prove beneficial in US practice.
• A home page button needed, not only exit button!
• Would love to see the explanations and references mentioned on the PDA version as well.
• We’d be happy if there’s an iPhone version [we were informed that they working on it].

For more details check out the Pda4peds review of NICUtools and it is included in the neonatology and the calculators categories.

This review was contributed in part by Michael Hewson.

Tags: NICUtools

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 2:52 pm and is filed under All, Calculators, Converters, Tools, Neonatology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.