HD Explorer, June 8th, 2015
The HD Explorer
The Health Data Exploration Project’s regular scan through the news.
Recent Events
Health Data Exploration’s First Annual Network Meeting
The Health Data Exploration Network held its first annual Network Meeting at the Qualcomm Institute in San Diego, CA on Wednesday, May 13, 2015. Many network members gave presentations on current Network projects and issues, and discussed interests in the area of personal health data.
Additionally, network and steering committee member, Dr John Brownstein, gave an open plenary on Digital Disease Detection. You can view Dr Brownstein’s talk by following the link here.
2015 Quantified Self Public Health Symposium
Data collected in the ordinary course of life holds clues about some of our most pressing questions related to human health and wellbeing. But significant barriers stand in the way of using personal and public data for understanding and improving individual and public health. At QSPH 2015, researchers, government leaders, and key decision makers from companies creating personal and public data products met to work towards a pragmatic, example-rich understanding of how to improve access.
News
Apple makes ethics board approval mandatory for all medical research apps
Getting approval from an independent ethics board is now mandatory for all apps made using Apple’s Researchkit — an open-source software platform meant to help scientists run clinical trials through apps available in the Apple app store. Read more…
Same City, but Very Different Life Spans
Life expectancy is a measure unlike any other, a sort of X-ray machine that can see through the geography of a city to the bones of a neighborhood’s distress. Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released life expectancy calculations for four cities, part of a broader series whose aim is to influence social policy. Read more…
Why Telemedicine Needs to Redesign the Doctor’s Appointment
Talking to doctors via video chat is the future. Talking to doctors via text message is the even better future we should hope for after that. Read more…
Dave Goldberg’s death points to rise and risks of treadmills in era of smartphones
Despite the darkness surrounding the incident, it is nonetheless shining a spotlight on the contraption at the center of the tech executive’s death: your run-of-the-mill treadmill. Read more…
Staffing An Intensive Care Unit From Miles Away Has Advantages
Recovering from pneumonia is an unusual experience in the 10-bed intensive care unit at the Carolinas HealthCare System hospital in rural Lincolnton, N.C. Read more…
Arc Pen Can Help Patients With Parkinson’s Disease Write Legibly
Lucy Jung never thought much about designing for sick people. Then she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She recovered, and the experience has driven her toward what she now thinks of her calling: to use design to help improve the quality of life of hospital patients and those with chronic conditions. Read more…
The States Where Fitness Is King
To find where people exercise most and least, exercise apps tracked 22 million users Read more…
Will The Hospital Of The Future Be Our Home?
The biggest part of healthcare is self care which takes places outside the medical system. I need to manage my health and disease not only in the hospital and during the doctor visits, but also at home. Still when people talk about the future of hospitals, they usually depict amazing technologies and really huge devices. Read more…
Google Developing ‘Brillo’ Software for Internet of Things
Google is working on technology that could run on low-powered devices, possibly with as few as 64 or 32 megabytes of random-access memory, according to people who have been briefed about the project. Read more…
Wearable technology may improve sleep, endurance and chronic pain
Sixty-three-year-old David Baker made a living driving tractor trailers in the South for 40 years. But when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2006, the condition meant the days he could still operate the equipment, much less walk without stumbling, were numbered. Read more…
Samsung Invents a Human Wearable Robot to Give Soldiers Extra Strength
The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a series of patent applications from Samsung that relate to a human wearable robot and a method of controlling it in relation to being walk-assistive. In one or more example embodiments, the wearable robot is configured to detect a standing time point and generate an auxiliary torque for assisting human muscle strength. Read more…
How Apple Watch could predict heart attacks in the future
The Apple Watch heart rate monitor is far better than everyone thought, and that could theoretically lead to big medical breakthroughs — like the ability to predict heart attacks before they happen. Read more…
Digital Health Funding In Q1 2015 Almost $650M
In 2014 digital health saw a record year of funding with over $4B, more than doubling funding in 2013 and matching the total of the previous three years combined. The big question entering 2015 was whether or not this growth would continue and it’s still too early to tell. Read more…
Got a suggestion?
Is there a news item or new research article that you think we should feature in the HD Explorer? Let us know at http://hdexplore.calit2.net/wp/contact/.
