Jonathan Cheesum Lau*, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada Pieter Leonard Kubben*, Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, Netherlands Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Web 2.0-based medical education and learning Presentation Type: Oral or poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MECC Room: 0.9 Athens Date: 2010-11-29 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Last modified: 2010-09-21

If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL).

NeuroMind is a free iPhone application developed for medical students and residents in the clinical neurosciences on Apple mobile devices. Clinical resources are offered in four categories: annotated anatomical pictures, differential diagnoses provided in both text and mind-map form, the WHO Safe Surgery checklist, and many relevant scoring and grading systems. Over the first few months of its release, it has been downloaded more than 15,000 times. This mobile application has been developed and maintained by a resident in neurosurgery, and hosted on his blog (DigitalNeurosurgeon.com). Updates have also been announced on the social media tool Twitter.

The Android platform was announced in 2007 with the aim of providing an open standard for mobile devices following the free and open-source software model. Since then, this platform has advanced significantly, and particularly over the last year, has been adopted by a significant subset of new mobile device users. Support by the Open Handset Alliance has allowed for the rapid introduction of new mobile devices by a plethora of different mobile device makers. Over the past several months, several users have asked about an Android version of NeuroMind. We believe that this tool should be available across mobile platforms, and our initial discussions resulted in this online collaboration between the Netherlands and Canada to meet this objective.

We present our experience porting this valuable clinical neuroscience resource to the Android platform using online collaboration. We wish to share information on differences between clinical application development on iPhone and Android platforms. In addition, we wish to emphasize how virtual communities and online collaboration facilitate efficient and effective international collaboration on project and application development.