“Radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it.”
Dr. Eric Topol brings power to the people in his new book The Creative Destruction of Medicine. This is the best guide I’ve seen to help consumers as well as professionals navigate the uncharted territory of personalized medicine. Read more »
“Now is the time. We’ve proven that it works in the clinic…multiple times and multiple ways. Now is the time that virtual reality (VR) needs to move out of the lab and into every clinic and hospital to deliver the clear benefits.” So began a pointed rallying call from Dr. Walter Greenleaf, who along with Jaron Lanier, pioneered the use of VR in clinical settings.
Known mainly for failing to live up to its potential, a recent conference “Medicine Meets Virtual Reality” (MMVR) highlighted how this label is fading…fast. Read more »
A recent discussion at Swissnex San Francisco provided insights into the challenge of making robots more human. This goal holds profound implications for healthcare and the treatment of injuries to the body and brain. Read more »
Dr. Ida Sim detailed a buzz-making project at the Silicon Valley Health Tech’s “mega-meetup”.
Sim is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she directs the Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics and is Co-Director of Biomedical Informatics for UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. She’s also the co-founder of Open mHealth.
Open mHealth was founded on the principle that there are “certain things we shouldn’t have to build over and over ” for mobile health applications.
The official topic at the BIOMEDevice conference was “speed to market”.
However, four leaders from diverse parts of the medical device industry offered solid and practical advice for all aspects of device design and development.
When asked to name the greatest challenge for device manufacturers in getting products to market, the leaders offered answers similar to those heard elsewhere in life sciences and healthcare. Read more »
Playing Farmville won’t make you fit.
However, serious injuries can benefit from serious games.
Not convinced? Check out two exhibits at San Francisco’s Swissnex, Think Art – Act Science (through 11/12) and Swiss Game Design Exhibition (through 10/27).
Both exhibits showcase technologies and collaborations between Swiss companies and academic institutions. Companion events are free to the public and include stimulating topics such as Next Level Health: How Games Improve Health and Healthcare.
My favorite demo was for a game created at the Zurich University of the Arts called GABARELLO v1.0.
The game is designed for children who have experienced lower body motor loss, through birth defects, accidents, etc. Children (or adults) are strapped to a special rehabilitation robot on a treadmill and through the use of sophisticated sensors, make the adorable virtual robot “move” across the various surfaces of a planet. This turns rehab work into a treat!
Other partners in the collaboration include University Children’s Hospital Zurich, the Institute for Neuropsychology (University of Zurich) and the Sensory Motor Systems Lab (ETH Zurich).
Successful collaborations like these are a roadmap for what is possible. With the ubiquity of platforms such as X-Box and Wii, look for this exciting trend to continue.
One of the biggest trends at this year’s Health 2.0 Conference involved giving patients and clinicians tools to make better decisions.
Ranging from low to high tech, all of these new products support the idea that health doesn’t stop at the doctor’s office.
One of the most interesting prototypes combined virtual reality, videoconferencing, artificial intelligence and Microsoft’s Kinect motion-capture system. In development at Orange (a subsidiary of France Telecom), the product allows patients to connect online with an avatar physician powered by intelligent agents in the background.
During the demo, a post-shoulder surgery patient received a check-up by calibrating his body to the Kinect system and then performing movements as instructed by the virtual doctor. The movements were measured and recorded, allowing the system to monitor the patient’s progress accurately and “see” that the range of motion increased by 14% since the last visit. With the patient on track, no office visit was necessary and additional questions that could not be answered by the avatar were referred to a live physician.
CareCoach was another solution using a tool we’ve come to know and love, the iPad. Care Coach was founded to combat “passive dialogue disorder”, or the feeling many patients have during a 5-minute doctor’s visit. Even though much is communicated, patients often don’t remember vital instructions by the time they pull out of the parking lot. CareCoach allows patients not only to record and replay these visits, but facilitates sharing among members of their designated care team–family, friends and even other care providers like visiting nurses.
Finally, audience members voted for their favorite new product during a segment called Launch. Ten companies gave four minute demos and the audience texted American Idol style to pick the winner.
Their pick? The Basis B1 wristband filled with sensors that’s worn like a watch. It measures the heart rate continuously by directing light into the skin to “see” the actual blood flow. These and other sensors allow insight into the number of calories burned, quality of sleep and other physiological metrics that combine to provide users with detailed insights into their health.
Scheduled to launch later this year, rumor has it the company is planning to offer even more than the standard black and white wristbands. Great news for all healthy fashionistas!
Clinicians, technologists, community leaders and entrepreneurs gathered last week to exchange ideas at Health Camp SFBay.
In this “un-conference” format, participants propose and select topics to discuss in small breakout groups.
This year‘s theme was accelerating healthcare innovation. Groups discussed issues and potential solutions ranging from low tech methods for promoting healthy populations (aka the broccoli revolution) to high tech solutions like virtual reality for training patients and clinicians.
Self-tracking was another dominant theme. Several groups, including members from the Quantified Self movement, formed to discuss how to collect, manage and use their own data. One participant detailed an experiment using an ingestible sensor (the size of a small pill) that transmits signals to a patch worn on her torso. Data from both the patch and sensor are then sent to a mobile phone for further processing.
Another common theme coalesced around trust–from the storage and appropriate usage of data to the validity of content found in online searches.
Mobile devices and social media were also prominent themes–15 participants “live tweeted” the event–and, several groups formed around how to best use the tools within these devices for health data.
Whether using high or low tech approaches, the entire group agreed that a person’s health doesn’t stop at the doctor’s office and that all patients are becoming more engaged in prevention and health management.
photo courtesy of Mike Doeff
Dr. Chrono co-founders Daniel Kivatinos and Michael Nusimow
Last September during Health 2.0, I interviewed Daniel Kivatinos and Michael Nusimow, co-founders of Dr. Chrono, a free iPad app of EHR/EMR and other point-of-care tools for physicians.
DrChrono has just announced that it has received official government certification approves $44,000 reimbursement for the app, as explained in the company’s press release.
From Futurity (http://www.futurity.org)
JOHNS HOPKINS (US) — Sift through 2 billion tweets and you can find a lot of useful public health intelligence on where people are sick, what ails them, and what they’re doing about it.
Computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul came up with a method that filters and categorizes health-related tweets—an approach that could be used to identify information about other trends from the Twitterverse.
“Our goal was to find out whether Twitter posts could be a useful source of public health information,” says Dredze, an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University. “We determined that indeed, they could. In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters’ doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home.” Read more »
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