It’s been a full, productive week, with Microsoft technology playing major roles in pediatric health, digital aviation, business solutions and emoji help. Here’s a look at this week’s highlights.
A new app is saving babies’ lives and helping parents, thanks to a technologically minded doctor and his team in Kansas City, Missouri. Conceived by Girish Shirali, a pediatric cardiologist at Children’s Mercy hospital, the CHAMP app helps babies born with heart disease by bringing doctors home virtually.
As parents care for their baby at home between surgeries, a cardiologist and nurse are looking over their shoulders every day through the app, which uses a Surface, Windows 10 and the Microsoft Cloud.
“I can see every piece of data within two minutes as it goes from the tablet to the cloud … We can catch things before parents do, because we’re the ones who are medically trained, and that’s the way it should be, to reduce the burden on the parents,” said Lori Erickson, a nurse practitioner and clinical coordinator of the program.
Also this week, Boeing announced a new relationship with Microsoft that will help define a new era of digital aviation. The companies will transition Boeing’s extensive portfolio of digital solutions to the Microsoft platform, enabling airlines to be more adaptive, innovative and intelligence-driven in how they solve business challenges.
“Who should care about this announcement? Anyone who has sat on a runway during a maintenance delay for longer than five minutes,” joked Nathaniel Crook, Microsoft’s director of enterprise sales in the Pacific Northwest.
The week also saw the debut of two new services that enable businesses to achieve more. Microsoft Stream, now available through a free preview, offers businesses of all sizes a new, easy and secure way to upload, share and tag videos. And Microsoft Bookings is a new Office 365 service that helps business owners, employees and customers easily make appointments.
Ever need help finding the right emoji to convey your thoughts? To the rescue comes Swiftmoji, a new app that predicts emojis based on what you type.
The app from SwiftKey —recently acquired by Microsoft — is now available for free on Android and iOS. It has more than 1,800 emoji and analyzes global emoji trends to give you the most relevant and topical predictions.
https://youtu.be/O3ytSQPfLAg
The Windows Store is counting down the days to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update with special countdown offers through July 29 on favorite games, moves and music.
With the update scheduled to release on August 2, the offers are a great way to stock up on free and discounted goodies, including a free “Minecraft: Story Mode” episode and a free roller coaster map for “Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta.”
This week on the Microsoft Facebook page, we met Winston, an infant born with a rare heart condition, and learned more about the Children’s Mercy app we talked about at the top of this post.
After a high-risk surgery, Winston’s family is now tracking his treatment at home, with the help of Microsoft technologies and a dedicated team of doctors.
https://youtu.be/qtbNiwM-BF4
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
Vanessa Ho
Microsoft News Center Staff