As a kid I was fascinated by the Guinness Book of Records. Each Christmas I would receive a copy and spend the rest of the year with my nose buried between the pages. One of the records that I found intriguing was that concerning the Vassilyev Family, an enormous sprawling family that held (and still holds) a number of records: The Biggest Family in the World with 87 children, the Most Prolific Mother with 69 children, the most multiple births to a mother with 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets. The father of these children Feodor Vassilyev was married twice, his first wife giving birth to 69 children, his second 18. 82 survived infancy and many lived to old age; which wasn’t bad for 18th century Moscow.
I also come from a large family, though not nearly as big as that of the Vassilyev’s; the fourth child of six, I have eight children myself, and between us we have 25 children and 7 grandchildren together. This is a trend right across our family so that we have armies of cousin’s, second-cousins, aunties, and uncles. My youngest sister says we more like a small town than a family. As a family we are different in so many ways, but also very similar in others; you could put all 32 of us in a room with a hundred other people and I bet that you would be able to pick us out. Not that we look that similar, although many of us share blonde hair and blue eyes (although my hair is now white), it’s just our characteristics, our personalities, they way we conduct ourselves that gives us away. For instance, my youngest sister is under 4’ 10” tall with dark hair, I am nearly 6’ with blonde hair; but we have the same likes and dislikes, react to situations in the same way, and are both very loud; we are very alike even though we didn’t grow up together.
The medical products family we offer at Sumo Technologies and Sumo Healthcare is also significant with over 30 different lines and in spite of the fact that they are all very different - screen sizes range for 6” to 24”, the range includes handhelds, tablets, PCs, and displays, some are battery-powered, and some are mains - you can tell that they all come from the same family because certain characteristics that they share: smart-card readers for security, they can be mounted on carts or trolleys, are ANSI/AAMI ES60601-1 certified with antimicrobial enclosures, can be cleaned with chemicals, and have a minimum of IP65 rating for ingress of water and dust. Where practical there is also commonality across product types; most our medical tablets share the same battery as do our battery-powered displays and PCs with a positive impact on cost of ownership as the range of chargers and types of spare batteries required is significantly reduced.
When one considers shared characteristics DNA cannot be ignored, longevity seems to be embedded in my family DNA with successive ancestors regularly living into their 90’s and succumbing to old age rather than some disease or illness. Whilst not biological our products do have “DNA” and like my family, longevity is an attribute with some of our earliest medical PCs and tablets having been in use in the NHS for over 10 years. They also tend not to fail with mean time between failure (MTBF) so long its almost impossible to calculate with most devices finally perishing due to attrition, or the not-so-slow march of Windows®.
If I were to sum up my own family I would say it is vast, long-lived, and comes in lots of shapes and size, not unlike the family of products that Sumo Technologies and Sumo Healthcare deliver. Why not check out our range on our websites www.sumotech.com or www.sumohealthcare.com.
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