Dr Chris Paton

doctorsgadgets.com was a website I ran from 2002 to 2008. It catalogued the small but rapidly evolving world of medical hardware and software running on personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the first generation of smartphones. The site had three main parts: a blog discussing new releases and clinical relevance; a product database of medical applications and devices with short reviews; and a community forum where doctors, medical students and nurses discussed which tools they were actually using in practice.

The era it covered — roughly the half-decade before the iPhone launched in 2007 — was a curious bridge between paper and the modern smartphone. The dominant devices were the Palm V, Palm Tungsten, Compaq iPaq and Tungsten T5; Pocket PC running Windows Mobile; the BlackBerry; and, towards the end of the period, the Treo and Nokia Communicator. Software like ePocrates, Skyscape, Medical Calc, Lexi-Comp and Tarascon's pocket pharmacopoeia were widely used at the bedside — often as much-loved alternatives to lugging around the printed BNF or Sanford's Guide. Hospital-issued PDAs were rare; almost everything ran on hardware doctors had bought themselves.

The community side of the site was probably the more useful half. Doctors and medical students compared notes on which devices survived a clinical year, which dosing calculators were trustworthy, and how to sync a paper prescribing formulary with a wirelessly-flaky PDA. A few discussions from that period — particularly around clinical decision support, drug interaction databases, and the safety of using consumer devices in clinical environments — turned out to be early prototypes of debates we are still having in 2026.

The original site is no longer online and the forum's user-generated content is not republished here. Snapshots from 2002–2008 are still browsable on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

What that subject area became

The medical PDA generation evolved fairly directly into the modern field of digital health. The same questions — can a doctor safely use a consumer device for clinical work? how should clinical decision support be designed to fit a real workflow? what does an evidence base for a medical app look like? — carried over from PDAs to smartphones, from native apps to web applications, and most recently to AI-assisted scribing and language-model-driven clinical tools. The hardware churned several times; the underlying human-factors and safety questions stayed the same.

My current work continues in this lineage. I am Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Digital Health & AI; I teach Introduction to Digital Health (DIGIHLTH 701) and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare (DIGIHLTH 704) at the University of Auckland; and I have written several open-access textbooks in this area, including the Textbook of Digital Health and the Textbook of Usability. My DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford, on the usability of digital health technologies, traces back fairly directly to the human-factors questions doctorsgadgets first raised about whether a Palm V could survive a ward round.