At the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House, attendees showcased PDA-based programs that create electronic medical records, environmental disease surveillance systems that take data gathered from sensors to pinpoint abnormal events and a digital ambulance that lets emergency medical personnel consult with an emergency room physician while providing en route care.

"We are trying to make sure we understand what technologies are available that can help us do our mission in taking care of the president and the White House," said Bill Lang of the White House Medical Unit, the event organizer. "This is a technology overwatch to see what's out there that might be of use to us" in taking care of the president, vice president, their families, the cabinet and the assistants to the president.

The advanced technologies displayed were representative of the work managed by the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center. The center has partnered to create items like the NOMAD head-mounted display that not only gives Stryker brigade members in Iraq situational awareness by showing allied and enemy positions on a digital map but also lets brigade medics see patient records. The digital ambulance was originally designed so physicians can telementor emergency medical personnel when they have to transport seriously injured patients from rural America to a hospital.

"Basically we're allowing the physician to intervene earlier in the care of a patient," said James Wall of the Texas Center for Applied Technology. For the military it permits "the medical expert that you wish were at the scene but is not there to be there. We've used communications and cameras and physiological telemetry to be able to virtually bring the physician there to assist in the treatment," he said.

One technology developed at TATRC the White House is already using is the Battlefield Medical Information System-Telemedicine. The BMIS-T is a point-of-care diagnostic tool for first responders--be it a medic, a physician's assistant or a doctor--that captures basic data from a medical encounter, said inventor Tommy Morris of TATRC. They put in the symptoms, and it comes up with a treatment plan based on the user's skill level.

Lang said the White House Medical Unit is also working with the center to develop a handheld medical facilities locator that uses global positioning system so the White House medical staff, which performs a great deal of travel medicine, will know at all times where the nearest medical center is and what capabilities it has.

The day's presenters made no sales pitches, but were enthusiastic demonstrators of their advances to visitors from the White House Medical Unit and the Interagency Medical Council who visited the stations in the building's 126-year-old Indian Treaty Room. The council comprises the medical directors of several major government organizations, primarily in the national capital region.

"Rather than taking all of us up to Detrick multiple times to see the projects, it's easier to bring them all together in one spot," Lang said, adding that it's not often he invites groups to showcase their projects.

Specializing in rapid prototyping -- or taking an invention and tweaking it to meet user needs -- TATRC is "blessed with working with some of the best partners from around the country," said TATRC Deputy Director Col. Dean Calcagni. "They're the fuel that feeds into this rapid prototyping process."

One room at the demonstration was packed with mobile computing applications that can feed into the BMIS-T. With a trend toward wireless applications, devices like the electronic information carrier demonstrated by Maj. Tim Rapp will one day serve as a collection point for transmitting information from sensors to the BMIS-T. And the sensor-packed glove called the MIDDAS (for Mobile Integrated Diagnostic and Data Analysis System) gathers a victim's vital signs almost instantly upon touch and can also wirelessly transmit to the BMIS-T.

"Much of this technology is truly spectacular. A lot of the technology is slightly different versions of trying to do the same thing but it's nice to have these different types of redundancies, and different approaches," said Rear Adm. Steve Ostroff, assistant surgeon general of the United States and deputy director for the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control.

Ostroff, also the president of the Armed Forces Epidemiologic Board, was especially interested in advanced technologies that hit on that area.

"Some of the epidemiologic issues that we have been looking at like heat stress in recruits, these (programs on PDAs) are fabulous to be able to monitor these people in real time as they come through their training," he said. "By looking at the patterns, you can identify circumstances and situations where the signals should go up that that's probably something that you need to change. You can monitor in real time and collate and congregate all the information."

Getting real time epidemiology data is the goal of PureSense, an environment monitoring system that uses a central server to collate sensor data for water, air, weather and pathogens and integrates that information with public health data to spot trends. If the system detects an unusual pattern, it calls to the user's cell phone and the user can visit a secure Web site and see that data live.

"We take sensors and provide the technological glue and intelligence to bring that data back and make intelligent decisions about it to be able to alert people and disseminate that information easily and to correlate these things together," said Kevin Montgomery, technical director of the National Biocomputation Center at Stanford University Medical Center. "What's really cool about the system is it detects what's normal and detects very quickly what's not."