Using the Wireless Camera Card

[aussiedentist]

Just bought a wireless camera card, wifi, called the "eye-fi"
You put it into your camera, and when you take a photo, it appears in a folder
C:\Users\User\Pictures\Eye-Fi/date

I want to know how to get od to automatically put it somewhere in the patients file
Any ideas how?

[jsalmon]

I don't think this is possible. With that said, I can give as much information to help the powers that be on the forum to try and help you find some sort of hack.

Every patient has their own unique folder. Therefore, when you take a patient's picture, you / the camera would have to "automatically" know the name of the patient's AtoZ folder whom you're about to take a picture of. This is why Open Dental typically has the patients account open and initiates the picture capture / launching of imaging software that can essentially do the same thing (initiate the device to capture an image).
^^To know each patient's image folder, take your AtoZImages folder path and tack on the entry kept in the patient table that corresponds to that patient. E.g. #123 John Smith has an image folder in \\Server\OpenDentImages\S\Smith123\... [path to AtoZ]\[patient.ImageFolder from db]
http://opendental.com/OpenDentalDocumen ... ml#patient

The manual way would be to take the patient's picture, go to the directory location which the camera saves all images and import it into the patient's images module. Then you could delete the photo from the directory that the camera automagically places images in order to kept clean and obvious to the person operating the camera which photo needs to be imported.

Without Open Dental causing the camera to capture the image (devices that support twain drivers for example) or without another software initiating the capture, this is going to be quite the feat to accomplish. Hope you can think of something.

[mopensoft]

jsalmon has suggested a good manual way to do it. I think you can write some code automate that process via program link. For example:
- from OpenDental, create a program link to fire up the camera software
- camera will take photo and save it to it's folder (fix path)
- open dental will go to the folder and import that image into OpenDental.

Hope it help

[Jay]

It might be easier to use a camera with a Twain driver and after selecting the appropriate patient, to capture from within OD's Image module using USB. Unfortunately I have not tried this and cannot recommend either camera or Twain driver but you could search for the right combo. The benefits of wireless are overrated in the dental setting and it is easy for setups to be insecure.

[bpcomp]

We use the eyefi in our office. It downloads the images to a folder on our server and then we manually import those images into the patient. This saves the steps of having to pull the memory card out of the camera and importing the images. We can start pulling up images with the patient in the chair while taking more images. It might be over rated but in our setup it is convenient.

[Jay]

We use the eyefi in our office. It downloads the images to a folder on our server and then we manually import those images into the patient. This saves the steps of having to pull the memory card out of the camera and importing the images. We can start pulling up images with the patient in the chair while taking more images. It might be over rated but in our setup it is convenient.

Sorry if that came across badly. I meant by 'overrated' that it's not hard to be close to a cable in dentistry since virtually everything else (handpieces, suction, xray sensor, intraoral camera) in the room is connected. You are obviously very handy with networks but I just worry that someone somewhere will choose 'password' for a password. No fault of the technology of course, but safer to rule it out. But yes, if what you describe is done right, it is convenient. The original poster though wants automatic assignment to the relevant patient and I don't see how that can be done. Even if a software could move the files to the correct patient folder, OD will not automatically display the image.

[bpcomp]

I agree Jay, automatic assignment is custom written software. I think it's possible with a plugin, but I'm not a software developer to say what is or is not easily done. The biggest issue I see is getting the plugin to recognize that the images that just showed up in the wireless upload folder should be transferred into which patient? The patient open on the server, the patient open in OP1? So now you need to have a button on the workstation that pulls images from the wireless upload folder but then you still have to sort, rotate, name, etc. This also does not scale at all for an office that has multiple camera's. This is not to say that all of these challenges couldn't be overcome but that it would take a lot of technology intelligence to make it easy. All in all, manually importing the images from the wireless upload folder works for us.

I second Jays concern that your wireless network be secure before you start to have patient data traveling over it.

[aussiedentist]

I had a play around with it, i am dumping all the jpegs from the wireless card into the same folder i dump the opg jpegs in, so that when i import either of them, i do not have to search around in different folders.

Seems to be working much better here now!

[aussiedentist]

An update if anyone is thinking of using the eye fi card.

It seems to work quite well, with one caveat

I have three networked computers, and it really does not like having its pictures put into a shared folder between the computers (which is what i would ideally like)

So, i have my reception camera (pt pictures, before and after botox, etc), dumping into the reception computer,

and then a separate surgery camera on my microscope, that dumps into my surgery computer.

[Justin Shafer]

jsalmon has suggested a good manual way to do it. I think you can write some code automate that process via program link. For example:
- from OpenDental, create a program link to fire up the camera software
- camera will take photo and save it to it's folder (fix path)
- open dental will go to the folder and import that image into OpenDental.

Hope it help

I did this with the snapscan. I modded OD code. I forget what it did.. But long story short, you clicked a button and it imported a pdf from a certain location.
It's doable..... Somehow... This will not work well for multiple images.

Can the eye card be accessed from command line over the wireless network? That would be easier.
copy files from eyefi to temporary location
clear files from eyefi card
import files from temp folder

So obviously, we need some more options for import to file, something automated, as a feature request. Otherwise, we will need to use a plugin.
1. Option to hardcode a path we can hard code (though I think it remembers?)
2. Import files.
3. Option to delete these files?