Welcome back to the blogosphere

There are a few reasons I've decided to increase the frequency of my posts. First, I've been reading more interesting blogs lately, and I'm starting to see how this is a good way to share information and also get your thoughts down. Maybe I'm more of a "mainstream" user, so it took some 2 years of getting used to blogs before they started looking appealing. Some of the blogs that have inspired me include:

* My BASD colleague Kevin Wang's blog: http://kjw.blogspot.com/
* Michael Turton's blog coverage in Taiwan: michaelturton.blogspot.com

Second, I'm starting to plan out my career as an entrepreneur, and I constantly have millions of ideas floating around in my mind, with no real destination to send them to. So far, I've been gmailing them to random friends, but they'll probably get tired of this soon. Also, I think the best way to craft the best idea is to share them. If someone else picks up some inspiration, and creates a solid business, that would be fantastic.

Anyhow, here's what I really wanted to talk about today. A couple days ago, I took my friend to the ER after he injured his arm in Judo practice. Looking around the Stanford ER, I noticed that things seemed to be in a general state of inefficiency and makeshift solutions. For example, the narrow hallways were crammed with chairs, movable beds, computer stands, and other various equipment. There might have only been 5 feet of usable walkway for the dozens of medical staff and visitors pacing back and forth in the cramped area. It occured to me that this could be an interesting market to offer some help to these guys. There should be some solution to help reduce congestion... maybe clear out some of the junk all over the place. Maybe the remedy is architecture... just not enough space to go around. But maybe there is something else... not too sure what, but I'll keep this in the back of mind for now.

Also, I was reading an issue of Business 2.0 (a great magazine to get the brain jogging) that featured an article on the market for sleep. Apparently, sleep deprivation is costing the economy quite a bit in the form of less-productive workers, accidents, and lower levels of well-being. Nap centers, sleep-disorder clinics, and high-tech beds are supposed to rake in a good chunk of profit from this trend. About a year ago, I decided to head to a sleep clinic to get some help with my sleep apnea. After spending an uncomfortable night in their monitoring room with electrodes strapped to my head and a pressure sensor stuck in my nose, I was diagnosed with mild sleep apnea (but given the foreign accomodation and rather intrustive instruments, does that come as any surprise?). Since then, I've thought about ways to make this diagnosis easier. One possibility is a mobile breathing-pattern recorder and analyzer. Such a device would be appropriate for home use, and could incorporate a software algorithm to detect abnormal breathing or snoring patterns. A quick search on Google, however, revealed that a team in Illinois is already working on this. Here's abstract:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1132269&dl=acm&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618
Authors: Nigam, Vivek; Priemer, Roland1
Source: Journal of Medical Systems, Volume 30, Number 2, April 2006, pp. 91-99(9)
Publisher: Springer

This paper presents a snore recorder that can separate snores from their delayed mixtures. This is useful to study the snore sounds of individuals when these sounds occur in a normal in-home sleeping environment, where two people are sleeping together and both produce sounds. Based on methods for blind source separation, we give a snore separator that solves the blind delayed source separation problem and provide a performance index to monitor its convergence. The separated snores can be analyzed to detect symptoms of sleep apnea prior to polysomnography or as a monitoring device after polysomnography has been performed. Experimental results show good performance of the snore separator.

I'm not sure how far this device has progressed or how far it's been commercialized. Might be an interesting opportunity here. In terms of sleep solutions, I've heard that the positive air pressure devices are highly effective, but these are quite bulky and require users to be fairly open-minded to use. An alternative that is smaller, easier to use, and better looking would an idea worth exploring.