A study of nurses relying upon handheld devices found that 16 percent said the mobile equipment had helped them avoid at least one error in clinical treatment while another six percent indicated it had enabled them to avoid errors on multiple occasions. Via Andrew Spong, dbtmobile 
Mobile App Rewards Users For Their Fitness Achievements
Kiip, a mobile application that offers real-world rewards for in-game achievements, has moved beyond gaming platforms with a new push to encompass the growing marketplace of fitness apps as well. In a move intended to help make achievements in non-gaming applications more meaningful, the updated application will reward users when they have achieved a “moment” within fitness applications. For example, if users log their run for the day in MapMyRun, they could get a reward from PepsiCo’s Propel Zero brand. The idea is to incentivize users through relevant brand-led rewards, creating more meaningful relationships between brands and consumers.
Electronic Skin Patches Monitor Health Wirelessly
Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed electric skin patches that can wirelessly diagnose health problems and deliver treatments. Developed to be a comfortable and functional system despite their small dimensions (about the width of a human hair), the patches can contain full-scale electronic circuits needed to monitor health status along with wireless capabilities that can be used to transmit data to the patient’s cell phone or the doctor’s office. The patches have the potential to eliminate the need for patients to stay attached to large machines in a doctor’s office or hospital room for hours of treatment or monitoring... 
A new generation of bionics which can connect wirelessly with the nervous system and feel are under development.
Animal tests have already been conducted in which devices are implanted directly into the nerve to process and transmit signals wirelessly to an external device.
Other researchers are developing prosthetic skin which might wrap around a bionic limb and feed back sensory information to the nervous system, in theory enabling users to detect and feel objects.
The current generation of bionic hands can pinch or grasp using two or more electrodes fitted inside the portion of the prosthetic which fits over the stump. Continue reading the main story
These electrodes are positioned to pick up signals from the user's peripheral nerve system that are naturally amplified by muscles in the stump. Progress is almost continuous. German company Otto Bock has developed a hand incorporating multiple electrodes which can drive wrist flexing and rotation.
While Scottish company Touch Bionics builds hands which use software to control individual finger movement, so that the hand can clasp around objects.
The surgical rewiring of nerves in an amputee can also offer a great deal, enabling those with no arm at all, for example, to drive bionic arms with elbow and hand movement.
But there are problems. Sweat on the skin or any movement in the prosthetic can disrupt the signal to the bionic limb. The prosthetics can also rub against the skin and cause discomfort and sores.
The next generation of bionics will try to overcome these problems and offer some sensory feedback to the user.
Wireless bionics
The rod means higher loads can be carried than with traditional prosthetics which fit over the stump of an amputee like a glove. It also avoids friction between the prosthetic and the skin.
Neural interfaces would be embedded in nerve trunks to read and transmit signals
"People have produced very sophisticated prosthetics which will do very sophisticated things, but in almost every case the thing that people are struggling with is to link it up successfully to the nervous system," he says.
"A lot of soldiers who have lost limbs apparently have given up using these devices and gone back to a simple hook, which at least is reliable. "The device we're producing is for recording sensory impulses in a nerve and gets inserted into the limb nerve itself."
Once the device is inserted into the nerve, nerve fibres grow through it. Nerve signals associated with particular movements are then selected, and these signals transmitted wirelessly to a receiver in the prosthetic.
So far the device has been tested in mice and rats for up to 12 months. While the researchers do have some concerns that scarring within the device could strangle nerve fibres and disrupt signals, no such problems have been detected to date, says Prof Fawcett.
"We have a programme which will develop a prototype interface in about three years' time and that will then be taken forward through the legislature for human safety and toxicity trials," he predicts.
Researchers in Italy are also working on wiring bionics to the peripheral nerve system, and have already conducted trials in which electrodes temporarily connected to the nerves were used to drive an unattached prosthetic hand.
Prosthetic skin
"We're looking into putting electronics onto surfaces that can be deformed, flexed but also stretched like a rubber band," says Stephanie Lacour of Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.
"The idea with the prosthetic skin would be to have some kind of a glove like a latex glove which we could fit around the current prosthetic limb but that would be full of electronic sensor function that would mimic the sense of touch we have in human skin." Eventually, such sensors might feed information back to the brain via neural interface devices, but in the meantime there are other options.
Andrei Ninu of Otto Bock shows the BBC's Neil Bowdler the firm's experimental prosthetic hands
The surgical rerouting of sensory nerves in the stump (or chest muscles where an entire arm is replaced by a prosthetic) could enhance the effect, by creating areas of skin which feel what fingers would once have felt.
A new generation of bionics could also enhance the lives of individuals who are paralysed from the neck downwards or who have conditions like Locked-In Syndrome.
Last year, a paralysed US man made headlines after temporary electrodes placed on his brain were used to control a remote prosthetic hand which he used to stroke his girlfriend's hand.
Back in Switzerland, researchers are testing a thought-controlled wheelchair which uses electrodes placed on the skin in a skullcap to drive the chair.
Prof Fawcett says such machines will be "a very exciting technology for the future" but says there are big problems to overcome.
"The issue with electrodes which record from the brain is bandwidth. You can transmit very little information and it's slow.
"The electrodes also have to be very localised so you can only record from one bit of the brain and at the moment the electrodes are very unreliable and tend to produce inflammation and this stops the electrodes working.
"The other issue is that the electronics which you have to add are very complicated and you have to attach large structures to these skulls." 
Doctors at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital made medical and social media history last month by live-tweeting an open heart surgery for the first time ever.
Dr. Michael Macris performed a double-coronary artery bypass on a 57-year-old patient. Meanwhile, colleague Dr. Paresh Patel provided 140-character updates throughout the procedure, and answered questions submitted by followers of the hospital’s @houstonhospital Twitter account. Dr. Macris also wore a video camera attached to his head. Dr. Patel snapped additional photos, and posted some of the pictures and videos to Twitter. The procedure lasted two and a half hours, and the patient made it through fine.
More than anything, though, the feat is a powerful example of social media’s ability to connect people and shed light on even the most unexpected activities. Its success is a lesson in using creativity and digital innovation to educate mass audiences. “We’re always becoming more connected as a society,” says Gary Kerr, CEO of the non-profit Memorial Hermann Healthcare System’s Northwest Hospital. “Information can’t be contained anymore, and that’s the most positive thing about the Internet.”
Hospital staff expected a modest amount of attention, but were surprised to see the event blow up online. Natalie Camarata, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System’s digital marketing manager, told Mashable the event delivered an estimated 125 million impressions through Twitter, Storify and media coverage in the weeks following the operation. Since the surgery, Mashable interviewed several of the people involved in the groundbreaking idea, asking them what it means that social media can be leveraged in new, effective ways. We spoke with Dr. Macris, Dr. Patel, Kerr, Camarata and Beth Sartori, a Memorial Hermann marketing and communications executive. What follows is their inside story. 
As we approach the November 2012 elections, there is an increasing amount of noise from politicians, pundits and talking heads on both sides of the aisle about major health care issues. Controversial and polarizing topics such as reforming Medicare and Medicaid, the Supreme Court’s review of Obama’s health care law, and the general fairness and legality of the individual mandate have come to the forefront of the national conversation many times in the presidential campaign.
And while these issues will certainly continue to be discussed and debated as we approach Election Day, it is important to understand the key challenges in the health care industry that lie beneath the noise. The health industry is faced with the task of finding a balance between the desire to invest in the research and development of new medicines quickly and aggressively, and the need to ensure that safety is part of each step of every medical innovation and advancement. Unfortunately, there is no simple method, model or standard to bring new medicines to patients both safely and effectively.
The demand for investment in research and development of new medicines is greater than ever, as drug shortages have become a growing and critical problem in America. In 2011, there were a record-high 267 new prescription drug shortages. This is 56 more than in 2010 and more than four times greater than the number of medication shortages in 2004, when just 58 drug shortages were reported.
The worsening drug shortage problem impacts patient care, especially in hospitals, as chemotherapy, surgery and care for patients with pain and infections are disrupted as a result of a lack of critical medicines. The shortages have also delayed clinical trials and have led to extraordinary price extortion, causing many hospitals to have to pay extremely large markups for limited drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has worked hard to proactively address this problem by working closely with FDA and supply chain partners to address disruptions, and by making continual investments in technology and manufacturing processes to improve quality control. However, many current shortages will not be resolved soon, due to key manufacturers that have had to shut down production because of contamination or other quality problems, or because certain medicines only have one other manufacturer, which lacks the capability to fill the gap.
Thus, while the pharmaceutical industry is taking great measures to address current drug shortages, they are also investing heavily in research and development, which helps lead to both medical advances and job growth.
Indeed, America’s biopharmaceutical research companies are working to help foster an environment conducive to the development of new treatments. More than 3,000 medicines were in development in 2011, and dozens of new drugs were approved by the FDA. 2011 marked one of the highest numbers of drug approvals in the past decade, and many of these new drugs reflect significant advances, including two new treatments for hepatitis C, a drug for lung cancer, and the first drug for lupus in 50 years. Seven medicines provide major progress in cancer treatments and almost half were judged by the FDA to be significant therapeutic advances for ailments such as kidney transplant rejection and heart attack.
This progress has been made in light of the daunting task that investing in such research and development has become. It is lengthy, expensive and risky. It takes 10 to 15 years for the initial discovery of the medicine to availability to patients, costs more than $1 billion for the development of a new medicine, and just two in ten approved medicines produce revenues that exceed the average research and development costs. In short, it is an enormous investment and commitment. Yet despite these challenges, America’s biopharmaceutical research companies maintain committed first and foremost to patient safety. Throughout the entire process – from the initial stages, to the clinical trials, to after a medicine comes to market and even after the investors have long moved on to other things, these companies do not waver when it comes to safety. By striving for modern regulatory systems that evolve with science and development, safety is insured as innovation, the development of new medical technologies and the use of science to treat patients in novel ways continues to evolve.
As health care issues evolve and become more complex going forward, so does the need to balance research and development, safety, and investment in medical innovations. 
A few years from now, when your doctor prescribes a prescription for you, you might not get a bottle of pills. Instead, your drugs might be delivered under your skin, from a small microchip. At least, that’s the promise of a new invention by MIT researchers Robert Langer and Michael Cima, who worked with MicroCHIPS, Inc. to develop a microchip capable of delivering prescription drugs to patients. The chip, which has been in development for over a decade, just completed its first human test, which it passed with flying colors.
Here’s how the chip works. It’s implanted underneath the skin of the patients (who, in the study, reported that they often forgot it was there.) The chip contains tiny reservoirs that the drugs are placed into. The reservoirs are sealed with a layer of platinum and titanium. When a current is applied to the seal, it melts, releasing the drugs into the patient’s bloodstream. The microchips are programmable, as well, so that the drug delivery can be automated.
In the study, the implants were used to deliver a drug to treat 7 women between the ages of 65 and 70 who suffer from osteoporosis. In all seven cases, the chip delivered the correct dose of drugs to the patients, and no adverse side effects were reported.
“Compliance is very important in a lot of drug regimens, and it can be very difficult to get patients to accept a drug regimen where they have to give themselves injections,” said researcher Michael Cima in an MIT press release. “This avoids the compliance issue completely, and points to a future where you have fully automated drug regimens.”
The other benefit of using the microchip is that it can be equipped with biosensors, which means that a doctor can monitor how effectively the drug is treating the disease, and remotely program the device according to adjust to changing circumstances. Right now, the device can only be reprogrammed remotely at very short distances, but the company and researchers are working on improving that aspect.
“This trial demonstrates how drug can be delivered through an implantable device that can be monitored and controlled remotely, providing new opportunities to improve treatment for patients and to realize the potential of telemedicine,” said study co-author Robert Langer in MicroCHIPS’ press release. “The convergence of drug delivery and electronic technologies gives physicians a real-time connection to their patient’s health, and patients are freed from the daily reminder, or burden, of disease by eliminating the need for regular injections.”
The next step for the company is to develop therapeutic regimens for the chip that can work with other diseases. The company intends to apply for regulatory approval to use the devices in 2014. 
Smartphones and tablets are transforming healthcare by shifting control to patients, but the evolution is not without its challenges.
The Future of mHealth is our series that explores opportunities and challenges of mHealth, which aims to put widespread access to healthcare within the reach of those who need it most.
Healthcare challenges are on the rise worldwide. Chronic conditions take an ever-greater toll, and costs are on the rise. But health insurance no longer bridges the gap for many, and healthcare systems struggle to balance the need for top-notch care and innovation against shrinking budgets.
Answering the challenge, many parties in the medical industry are ramping up development of apps and software for mobile devices, which may increase speed and ease the delivery of healthcare to patients who need it most, especially in areas like preventing diseases, managing chronic conditions, and navigating the complexities of the hospital and insurance systems. The payoff could be great, but the incorporation of mobile technology into the complicated healthcare system is not without its perils.
Motivation, Education, and Prevention on the Go
According to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, conditions such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, arthritis and cancer are the most common and costly health problems in the U.S.
Habits like smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, high stress, or excess body weight increase risks for conditions like heart disease that threaten life and health. These diseases represent the largest concentration of healthcare spending, taking a huge toll on both well-being and wallets.
People can largely prevent or control these conditions, however, by instigating healthy changes and staying motivated to stick with them. Mobile health solutions can help consumers achieve this goal, bringing them a step closer to better health through education and motivation, and ultimately streamlining use of the healthcare system.
Apps such as MealSnap provide an instant calorie count when a user snaps a picture of their plate with a smartphone, encouraging healthy eating.
Other apps, such as FitBit and Fooducate, track exercise and calorie intake to help people stay on course with weight loss, while the government-sponsored Text4Health program is proven to help people stay tobacco-free through use of motivating and informational text messages.
Other apps help people track exercise intensity and time, use the GPS in their phones to map running and walking routes, compete against themselves and others to take more steps or perform more activity minutes, and keep a daily diary to identify and avoid triggers for conditions such as migraines and asthma.
Managing Conditions Gets Easier... Dr. Benabio is a graduate of Brown University and Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He graduated first in his class in medical school and served as chief dermatology resident at the University of California Irvine. He's currently a Voluntary Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSD and partner physician at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, CA. An award-winning speaker, he has addressed national audiences for Kaiser Permanente, the American Academy of Dermatology, and the American Telemedicine Association.
For over five years, Dr. Jeff Benabio has been using social media channels to help patients learn about skin health and disease and to help doctors learn about engaging patients more effectively. In his practice Dr. Benabio uses disruptive tools such as telemedicine and mobile devices to improve patient access and reduce medical costs. In his talk he'll show us how we're re-inventing medicine with Twitter and Facebook, and why it's the best thing to happen to medicine since vaccines. Big Data has arrived st Seton Health Care Family, fortunately accompanied by an analytics tool that will help deal with the complexity of more than two million patient contacts a year, usually attended by dozens of existing patient record pages and generating more with each visit — some electronic, many notes in phyiscian’s infamous handwriting, some transcribed from dictation and others jotted down on X-rays.
Fortunately, some discussions between IBM and Seton on the transformation of health care has led to a health analytics project for the hospital group. Fresh from his stunning victory on Jeopardy!, Watson has been dismantled and parts shipped off to Texas under the effective alias: “Content and Predictive Analytics for Health Care.” Who’d ever guess his true identify as he works undercover at Seton, which operates five major medical centers and four smaller hospitals in 11 counties around Austin in central Texas.
Seton, which has been ranked as the top health care system in Texas and among the top 100 integrated health care systems in the country, put IBM’s analytics tool to work on patients with congestive heart failure to see what it could do.
“It’s a tricky condition because it may have immediate implications or it might take 10 years before it starts showing up in extensive hospital utilization and poor outcomes,” said Ryan Leslie, vice president for analytics and health economics at Seton.
A pioneer in reaching beyond hospital walls to provide care, Seton wants to pull together vital patient information and present it to care providers in a way that doesn’t require them to search through pages of records looking for anything pertinent.
“We have experience using a lot of structured data for forecasting and analysis, but about 80 percent [of patient information] is unstructured, such as a physician’s dictation after meeting with a patient. Now that is starting to be electronically transcribed and stored, but only in medical records as a one-off use, so an individual clinician looking at records on an individual patient might have to dig through pages and pages.”
Clinicians needed an aggregated view.
“We had no means of doing that. IBM (Watson, actually) offered the technology that could look into this enormous trove of unstructured data and find things that would be predictive of future negative health outcomes.”... 
Surgeons sporting 3-D glasses, and mobile apps that can share ultrasound pictures with loved ones during a check-up illustrate some of the high-tech gadgetry revolutionising the healthcare sector.
Numerous electronics makers are introducing their innovations to the UAE, where spending on health care topped Dh28 billion (US$7.6bn) last year and is forecast to grow more than 8 per cent this year, according to data from Business Monitor International.
Businesses, including smartphone manufacturers, software developers and insurers, are expected to benefit from a growing number of doctors who are turning to mobile phones in particular to more accurately diagnose and examine patients from afar. "Mobile-enabled health solutions, known as mHealth, are a critical growth area within the healthcare sector today," said Tom Farrell, the vice president of Nokia in the Middle East. "Its potential for growth in emerging markets, both for consumers and healthcare service providers, is considerable." This is the first year the Arab Health exhibition, which begins tomorrow in Dubai, will be hosting a conference dedicated to mHealth.
The session will showcase how doctors can monitor aspects of a patient remotely, including blood pressure and glucose levels.
"It's being implemented in the US, and moving into Europe - and we're hoping to bring it to the forefront of people's minds in the UAE," said Lisa Stephens, the executive director of the life sciences division at Informa Exhibitions, which puts on Arab Health.
Companies are now pouring millions of dollars into mHealth research and development - even if they have to give money away to spur new ideas. Last week, the chip maker Qualcomm launched a global competition - with a $10 million prize - to stimulate innovation relating to medical... 
Stroke and Parkinson’s Disease patients may benefit from a controversial experiment that implanted microchips into lab rats. Scientists say the tests produced effective results in brain damage research.
Rats showed motor function in formerly damaged gray matter after a neural microchip was implanted under the rat’s skull and electrodes were transferred to the rat’s brain. Without the microchip, rats with damaged brain tissue did not have motor function. Both strokes and Parkinson’s can cause permanent neurological damage to brain tissue, so this scientific research brings hope.
“Imagine there’s a small area in the brain that is malfunctioning, and imagine that we understand the architecture of this damaged area. So we try to replicate this part of the brain with electronics,” Matti Mintz, a professor at Tel Aviv University, told the BBC.
Scientists trained rats with and without microchips to blink after hearing a sound it associated with a puff of air to test motor function. Rats with a microchip blinked after the sound played and before the air was actually blown. A rat without a microchip did not blink when it heard the sound. Watch the video to learn more about the research and to see who is angry about it. 
This is the third year I’ve compiled a “top ten” of the past year’s big brain science studies, and each year it gets harder to narrow down the list. Several more studies could be added to the 2011 docket of notables, but these are the studies that grabbed me the most, in large part because of their implications moving forward.
1. Brain Implant Enables Memories to be Recorded and Played Back
Neural prosthetics had a big year in 2011, and no development in this area was bigger than an implant designed to record and replay memories. Researchers had a group of rats with the implant perform a simply memory task: get a drink of water by hitting one lever in a cage, then—after a distraction—hitting another. They had to remember which lever they’d already pushed to know which one to push the second time. As the rats did this memory task, electrodes in the implants recorded signals between two areas of their brains involved in storing new information in long-term memory. The researchers then gave the rats a drug that kept those brain areas from communicating. The rats still knew they had to press one lever then the other to get water, but couldn’t remember which lever they’d already pressed. When researchers played back the neural signals they’d recorded earlier via the implants, the rats again remembered which lever they had hit, and pressed the other one. When researchers played back the signals in rats not on the drug (thus amplifying their normal memory) the rats made fewer mistakes and remembered which lever they’d pressed even longer.
The bottom line: This is ground-level research demonstrating that neural signals involved in memory can be recorded and replayed. Progress from rats to humans will take many years, but even knowing that it’s plausible is remarkable.
2. Controlling microRNA Could Eventually Make Brain Cells ‘Death Resistant’
Like tiny toggle switches, microRNA are powerful molecules that silence the activity of as many as two-thirds of all human genes. In recent years they have emerged as key players in neurobiological development and disease. In 2011, researchers made the incredible discovery that microRNA may also be able to make brain cells resistant to programmed death, or “apoptosis.”
A huge amount of the human brain’s neurons die as we undergo normal growth and development. A portion, however, do not die, and they live on for the long haul. No one has been sure why those neurons survive the destructive “pruning” phase that eliminates droves of other neurons. The current research indicates that microRNA are at the heart of neuron survival, acting to essentially turn off the apoptosis mechanism that leads to cell death.
The bottom line: If microRNA can be controlled in the brains of patients with neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, ALS and Parkinson’s, then we may be able to halt the cell destruction those diseases cause and effectively stop the disease before the damage is done. It’s important to note that this research was conducted using mice, but it’s also the first to make this discovery in any mammalian brain and a promising initial step.
3.... 
Among the expected rows of new televisions, computers, phones and tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show is a growing number of health gadgets. These vary in form and function, but nearly all of them share some common elements: connectivity, mobile applications and social aspects.
These devices are no longer the domain of the geeks and early adopters but are hitting their mainstream stride as prices have dropped on gadgets with more and more sensors to monitor our health. The mobile app revolution and rise of social networks have helped bring such health-related tools to the forefront as well. Here’s a peek at just a few of those sharing floor space with the traditional consumer electronic gadgets...
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You never know who is going to sit next to you on an airplane. Usually it’s just someone who wants to read his newspaper and sip ginger ale in peace. But then there’s the rare instance when you happen to be seated next to one of the world’s best known living scientists.
Such was my luck earlier this week on a flight back from New York, when I was stunned to see Dr. Michio Kaku stowing his carry-on over my head before taking his window seat.
If you don’t know who Michio Kaku is, all you have to do is turn on almost any Science Channel or Discovery show about space exploration, black holes, worm holes, or technologies of the future. Or you could pick up one of his seven bestselling books, like his latest New York Times Bestseller, Physics of the Future. Or tune into his weekly national radio programs, Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science.
If you want to know what makes a science writer off-the-chain happy, it’s chatting with a world class scientist for two hours and change, with drinks and snacks to boot. Aside from being a brilliant theoretical physicist, Dr. Kaku is also a heck of a nice guy. He graciously gave me more ideas than my pen could catch, any of which would be a substantial article on its own. I’ll just run the highlight reel for now.
One of the most intriguing items he mentioned is the research effort underway in Japan to photograph dreams. Dr. Kaku described this as “doable” and thinks it’ll eventually happen. The idea is that brain activity in the visual center of the brain can be read and captured as pixels on a screen. In dream state, the brain’s visual center is excited, producing an abundance of images that are theoretically ripe for the capturing.
Dr. Kaku explained that it’s already possible to translate simple images this way. Say, for example, you envision the letter U. The brain activity associated with holding this image in mind can be captured via nodes attached to your scalp and translated into individual pixels that will eventually resemble a U. The technology is still a bit clunky at this stage, but the underlying science is sound. One day we will hear of the first photographed dream and we’ll have an entirely new wrinkle in the privacy debate to iron out.
Dr. Kaku also discussed a recent step forward in brain-interface technology. For the first time, a sub-cranial interface is enabling epileptic patients to pick out individual words on a screen simply by thinking about them. Previously it was possible to move a cursor around the screen this way, but never before has the technology enabled precise selection of words. This advance brings us one step closer to a brain prosthetic for instantly communicating by merely thinking.
Stephen Hawking, a colleague of Dr. Kaku’s, uses a single-channel brain interface device called iBrain to communicate via brain waves, though it isn’t sub-cranial. Lou Gehrig’s disease has rendered Hawking almost completely unable to move any part of his body. Brain interfaces could one day change the lives of those with similar medical conditions.
We also chatted about judicial decisions on whether fMRI should be allowed as a lie-detection technology in court. This to me is truly scary, because the technology is not nearly far enough along to be used this way. If it’s allowed, brain imaging would become a legal crowbar for prosecutors and defense attorneys – an exceptionally bad outcome considering that neuroscientists themselves are still debating the usefulness of the technology.
For more with Dr. Kaku, check 0ut a great interview he recently did with The Wall Street Journal here. And his latest book is well worth your time. 
THE rise and rise of health apps and tracking gadgets bodes well for wellbeing, writes Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson
It's the latest trend in hi-tech healthcare and it doesn't involve consulting Dr Google.
"DIY health" has been named as the second biggest trend of 2012 by Trendwatching.com, thanks to a surge in fitness apps, record spending in the category and an incoming wave of health gadgets that track your every move and vital sign.
These smart devices can now record more than just the number of steps you take and the calories you burn. They can also judge the quality of your sleep, record your blood pressure and test your blood sugar, uploading every detail to an app for mobile monitoring.
Healthcare and technology experts say the popularity of the category is set to grow exponentially this year, although they warn these apps are no substitute for professional medical advice.
Apple's App Store already houses more than 7700 health and fitness apps, and independent research firm Technavio estimates spending on these apps will reach $4.1 billion by 2014.
Furthermore, Research2 Guidance predicts 247 million smartphone users will download a mobile health app this year - almost double last year's audience of 124 million.
The popularity of these apps, the firm says, has been heightened by sensors attached to smartphones, many of which began to emerge late last year.
These gadgets include wearable devices that track users movements, like the Jawbone Up, FitBit Ultra, and Nike's FuelBand (reviewed right), as well as more serious medical devices.
University of Technology Sydney senior lecturer Dr Peter Leijdekkers, who founded the MyFitnessCompanion website and Google Android app, says the trend now encompasses serious medical instruments too, with smartphone connectivity added for convenience and easy monitoring.
"In the past these gadgets were standalone devices," Dr Leijdekkers says.
"If you had a blood glucose monitor, you had to write down your results in a book or type them into a spreadsheet. Nowadays a lot of these new devices have wireless communication - Bluetooth, ANT or wireless connections - and their results can be added to a mobile phone."
Dr Leijdekkers says this is particularly important for people whose health conditions require constant monitoring, but the devices can increasingly be found in the hands of healthy people who simply want to improve their fitness.
It's a trend that has seen more than 5500 people download his MyFitnessCompanion app, for example, that compiles data from other devices. "The line between medical and fitness gadgets is getting blurry," he says. "It depends on how you want to use them."
iWorld Australia director Aldrin DeClase says a series of health devices unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show this January will arrive in local stores this year, further blurring the definition. The iHealth Smart GlucoMeter, for example, plugs into the base of an iPhone, iPad or iPod and can be used to measure blood sugar.
"You just prick your finger, swab it and insert the swab into this device and it uploads the information to an app," DeClase says. "You can monitor your blood sugar levels and it can also give you alerts." The device is due in Australia in September, as it is awaiting approval by health organisations.
Other health devices now on the market include blood pressure monitors that connect to smartphones, weight scales that wirelessly upload your statistics to an online database, and sleep monitors that provide details of deep sleep, rapid-eye movement and sleep disturbances.
The good news, Dr Leijdekkers says, is that all this monitoring can provide plenty of motivation for those who want to improve their health and fitness. "You can compare it to watching your weight," he says. "If you are aware of your weight and you want to do something to change it then this sort of technology works."
Health-monitoring gadgets
iHealth Smart Glucometre
Withings Blood Pressure Monitor
FitBit Ultra
Jawbone Up
Zeo Sleep Manager 
A tiny prototype robot that functions like a living creature is being developed which one day could be safely used to pinpoint diseases within the human body. Called 'Cyberplasm', it will combine advanced microelectronics with latest research in biomimicry (technology inspired by nature). The aim is for Cyberplasm to have an electronic nervous system, 'eye' and 'nose' sensors derived from mammalian cells, as well as artificial muscles that use glucose as an energy source to propel it.
Cyberplasm is being developed over the next few years as part of an international collaboration funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA. The UK-based work is taking place at Newcastle University. The project originated from a 'sandpit' (idea gathering session) on synthetic biology jointly funded by the two organisations.
Cyberplasm will be designed to mimic key functions of the sea lamprey, a creature found mainly in the Atlantic Ocean. It is believed this approach will enable the micro-robot to be extremely sensitive and responsive to the environment it is put into. Future uses could include the ability to swim unobtrusively through the human body to detect a whole range of diseases.
The sea lamprey has a very primitive nervous system, which is easier to mimic than more sophisticated nervous systems. This, together with the fact that it swims, made the sea lamprey the best candidate for the project team to base Cyberplasm on.
Once it is developed the Cyberplasm prototype will be less than 1cm long. Future versions could potentially be less than 1mm long or even built on a nanoscale.
"Nothing matches a living creature's natural ability to see and smell its environment and therefore to collect data on what's going on around it," says bioengineer Dr Daniel Frankel of Newcastle University, who is leading the UK-based work. Cyberplasm's sensors are being developed to respond to external stimuli by converting them into electronic impulses that are sent to an electronic 'brain' equipped with sophisticated microchips. This brain will then send electronic messages to artificial muscles telling them how to contract and relax, enabling the robot to navigate its way safely using an undulating motion.
Similarly, data on the chemical make-up of the robot's surroundings can be collected and stored via these systems for later recovery by the robot's operators.
Cyberplasm could also represent the first step on the road to important advances in, for example, advanced prosthetics where living muscle tissue might be engineered to contract and relax in response to stimulation from light waves or electronic signals.
"We're currently developing and testing Cyberplasm's individual components," says Daniel Frankel. "We hope to get to the assembly stage within a couple of years. We believe Cyberplasm could start being used in real-world situations within five years". 
Strains of seasonal influenza behave slightly differently season to season and strain to strain. The differences are revealing. The rate of transmission of the 1918 pandemic, which killed 40 million people, closely mirrors the data from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The two strains are, in fact, closely related. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), epidemiologists study the patterns of flu data from the current season against historic data. The comparison helps them make informed decisions about how to respond to the virus: what kind of vaccine to make, how to make it, and how and where to distribute it. As data sets improve, scientists will be able to better predict how future strains of seasonal influenza will spread. 
Dr. Eric Topol is only half joking when he says the smartphone is the future of medicine — because most of his patients already seem “surgically connected” to one.
But he says in all seriousness that the smartphone will be a sensor that will help people take better control of their health by tracking it with increasing precision. His book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” lays out his vision for how people will start running common medical tests, skipping office visits and sharing their data with people other than their physicians.
Dr. Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Medical Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is already seeing signs of this as companies find ways to hook medical devices to the computing power of smartphones. Devices to measure blood pressure, monitor blood sugar, hear heartbeats and chart heart activity are already in the hands of patients. More are coming.
He acknowledges that some doctors are skeptical of these devices. “Of course, the medical profession doesn’t like D.I.Y. anything,” he said. “There are some really progressive digital doctors who are recognizing the opportunities here for better care and prevention, but most are resistant to change.”
Dr. Topol may be right about the caution in the industry, but he is far from the only person with this vision. Apple was promoting the iPhone as a platform for medical devices in 2009. An entire marketplace is evolving that marries the can-do attitude of hacking devices with the fervor of the wellness movement.
Smartphones make taking care of yourself more of a game, Dr. Topol said. “I recommend these devices because it makes it more fun and I get more readings than if I ask them to do it manually.” The enthusiasm for this vision of do-it-yourself medicine with a smartphone, though, must be balanced with the cold reality that all of the experimenters should consult with their physicians. Some of the attempts to turn the iPhone into a medical device are little more than toys. The 99-cent iStethoscope Pro app warns, “This app is intended to be used for entertainment purposes.” Those who have bought it have given it uniformly poor reviews.
The equally poorly reviewed iStethoscope Expert 2012, also 99 cents, offers a $24 bell to enhance the sound.
I experimented with a homemade otoscope, the device doctors use to look into the ears, connected to a smartphone so I could take pictures of a family member’s eardrums. My son has had infections in his Eustachian tube and the doctor likes to take a look. I figured that if I could take a picture or a video of the eardrum, I could save the trouble of him missing school to visit the doctor.
With the help of a little duct tape, I attached the phone to a small home otoscope from a company called Dr. Mom Otoscopes. It is just a lens, a light source and a plastic sleeve and sells for $27. To improve the image, I inserted a $20 close-up lens I had bought from Photojojo.com.
The biggest problem was in the software of the smartphone. The Apple camera app balanced the light and dark over the entire image, washing out the center so the eardrum was just a sea of white. The Android camera app offered the option of using spot metering so the light balance was better.
Despite all this fiddling with the optics and the software, the result was never very good. Better results require more than duct tape.
Firefly Global in Belmont, Mass., makes a medical camera and sells it directly to doctors who want to share the images with patients and save them for the future. Its line includes cameras for dentists, dermatologists and ophthalmologists. Unfortunately, the $180 to $350 cameras connect to a computer, not a smartphone.
The most prevalent diseases and the biggest markets are getting the tools first. Devices to monitor heart disease are already available. A French start-up, Withings, has created a blood pressure cuff for $129 that connects to an iPad or an iPhone. The cuff will automatically inflate, deflate and then record the pulse rate and the blood pressure. The app will graph the pressure over time, making trends easier to see.
Withings also includes a connection to its Web site so users can share their data with their doctors either directly through their password-protected pages or through third-party sites like digifit.com. The growing incidence of diabetes is by many estimates the biggest public health challenge today, so companies are developing tools to help people with the disease manage their blood sugar. Tom Xu, the founder of SkyHealth in El Cerrito, Calif., created the Web site glucosebuddy.com to help people keep track of the sugar in their blood. The numbers must be entered manually. The site works with an app for the iPhone to gather the blood glucose level and some information about when it was taken. “Our main goal of glucosebuddy is not to just record numbers. That’s the boring part,” he said. “Once you know how your diet affects your blood sugar, you take your health more seriously.”
Other companies are beginning to integrate the hardware and software. AgaMatrix, a company that makes a blood glucose monitor, iBGStar, that attaches to the iPhone, worked with Sanofi, the pharmaceutical giant, to develop the tool. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the device for sale in the United States. “When patients are dealing with chronic conditions, you might see a doctor every six weeks or two months,“ said Joseph Flaherty, the senior vice president for marketing at AgaMatrix. “For people to have real command over these diseases, we need to close the feedback loop and give people the information they need to make smarter decisions in real time.“
Its tool, like many other pocket meters, measures the amount of glucose in the blood, but it also transfers the data to the smartphone, which helps patients to track their glucose levels over time. It is not much different from a piece of paper and a pen, but it is faster and cleaner, and it is easy to share these values with doctors and friends. Johnson & Johnson has also spoken publicly about developing a similar device. The ultimate goal is replicating the full-body diagnostic “tricorder” from the “Star Trek” TV show, a goal that is being encouraged by a $10 million prize put up by Qualcomm, the smartphone chip maker, through the X-Prize Foundation.
Apps that simulate the lights and sound of the TV show prop are available from app stores. 
The holiday season may be over, but the time spent with friends and family may still be fresh. In all the gatherings, I would bet you had at least one conversation about health--your diet for 2012, a friend’s pledge to exercise more, Mom’s rehab from her surgery, Dad’s long list of medications. It is impossible to escape that time of year without thinking about health; whether you are fortunate to have good health, or hoping this year will bring it.
The good news is 2012 will be the year of good health--at least in the world of design and technology. Where I live in Silicon Valley, many people believe home health will be the next big boom. The Rock Health incubator is churning out a slew of startups that will help you manage your health, the iPhone 5 is expected to launch with a built-in heart rate monitor, and sick people everywhere will begin to look at health care more as consumers than as patients.
There is reason to be skeptical here. In the past few decades, people have cared deeply about health yet have continued to take lousy care of themselves. Let’s face it: Healthy people have always taken it for granted, and unhealthy people are often terrible patients. So what’s changing, and why is now the time for a metamorphosis in home health?
The answer comes down to two significant factors: (1) People are expanding their definition of “health” to include proactive wellness and ownership of treatment, and (2) There is a huge opportunity for designers to inject desire into this category. By the end of 2012, I believe the lines will blur between the health care, technology, and home products industries.
HEALTH REDEFINED
When it comes to wellness, or living a preventative lifestyle, Americans have been obsessed with losing weight since we started getting obese in 1990. But only in the last couple years have we actually started to care about full-body wellness. As an example, just look at the number of yoga studios and natural foods markets popping up throughout the Midwest and South. This movement is mainstream, not just for the hippies where I live. It represents a big shift: body weight to full-body wellness.
Compare that to medicine, or the treatment of a condition, where we used to think doctors were the only ones in control of our health. Now, with our health care system so messed up, we only go to the doctor when it is absolutely necessary--for procedures and prescriptions. And with that health care system incentivized to push patients out of the hospital as fast as possible, people are quickly learning to take recovery into their own hands. Access to medical information through resources like WebMD has forever changed the way we handle our health. This is another big cultural shift: responsible doctor to self-responsibility.
OPPORTUNITY FOR DESIGN
PRODUCTS LIKE THESE NEED THE ELEMENT OF DESIRE TO STAND ANY CHANCE.
All truly great designs balance three distinct characteristics; they are useful, usable, and desirable. Sadly, the home health industry is often missing a third of the recipe--desire. That’s because the ingredients that make a product or experience desirable are the easiest to dismiss; they’re not rational or quantifiable. Because home health takes its roots in the medical industry, it is historically practical and lacks personality. The truth is that there is good reason for a surgical tool to be mostly useful and usable, because all you really desire is for the darn thing to save your life. But home health products are used by regular people, and most do not have the instant impact of immediately saving your life. Products like these need the element of desire to stand any chance in a competitive consumer landscape.
Stay tuned for my next post focusing on several specific areas for expanding home health. 
My mom called me crying recently. She’s 68 years old, overweight, inactive, and suffers from a litany of “old-age ailments” including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, borderline diabetes, arthritis, and hearing and vision limitations. Her situation probably sounds familiar to a lot of baby boomers and their kids.
[...] Over a few weeks, we did research, spoke with patients and caretakers, met with product vendors, and concluded that there were four main facets to the challenge:
1. Medical Getting-to-Know-You
The good news is that a piece of pending legislation will require all prescriptions to be entered into a central database, which will be accessible by both the pharmacy and physicians. This way my mom’s various doctors will know what the others have prescribed from their respective hospitals and treatment conflicts can be avoided. As of now, this is completely invisible.
Private companies such as SureScripts are building the infrastructure that will centralize much of this critical information. But the bad news is that this useful consolidation of information has been stalled by the great U.S. health-care debate, so there are no guarantees if and when people like my mom will ever benefit from its technology.
At the same time, Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault have made significant investments in helping individuals keep track of their overall health records, including their medication summary. The problem is it’s currently the responsibility of the patient to enter and maintain this information. I know that my mom -- and many others out there -- won’t take the time to keep this current, even if she has a personal incentive to do so.
Unfortunately, lack of widespread adoption has already hurt one of the main players. Google announced in June that Google Health will be discontinued on January 1, 2012. So it’s still unclear which service will own responsibility for maintaining and accessing medical records in the long term. For the moment, people like my mom are still relying on handwritten notes in their purses when they visit the doctor’s office.
2. Sorting Through the Chaos
The widely publicized ClearRX pill bottles from Target were a huge step in the right direction. Launched in 2005, ClearRX was a series of color-coded pill bottles with large, legible labels that made it easier for patients to keep track of what was inside each bottle. Target’s emphasis on patient care was well received by both the press and patients, boosting pharmacy sales significantly. However, six years later, ClearRX still represents a very small percentage of the 3.6 billion prescriptions filled each year. The everyday challenge of getting pills out of the tamper-proof bottles and into the daily dosage case remains a laborious task, both physically and mentally. There is a gaggle of simple plastic tools, including several generic pill-counting trays, but most still require significant manual dexterity or keen eyesight. None of these would help my mom with her situation.
3. Keeping Track of the Pills
Nevertheless, companies are providing alarms that remind patients when it’s time to take their pills (some with friendly but weird recorded voice messages). Some even incorporate data collection to confirm that pills were taken on a regular basis. Devices like MedSignals and Vitality Glo-Caps are good examples. But neither would help my mom; she takes multiple pills per day and wouldn’t have the patience or skill to program the system herself in the first place.
The fact is most patients who have settled into an active life with an illness don’t need to be reminded to take their pills at all. My mom has set up many resourceful reminder systems, such as putting her morning pills by the coffee maker and her evening pills on her night stand. She follows a well-practiced routine, and taking pills has become a regular part of her day. The danger is what happens when that routine breaks down, which is what happened when my mom got pneumonia. She was thrown off her regimen. In these situations, friendly dosage reminders can help make sure nothing slips between the cracks. Sadly, one of the most common recommendations is an oversized wristwatch with bells, buzzers, and blinking lights that does nothing more than stigmatize the illness.
4. Communicating with the Doctor
Even if the patient brings in their crumpled piece of paper and tells the doctor that they have religiously been taking their meds (similar to telling the dentist that you’ve been flossing every day), doctors have no way to know whether the information is accurate. For example, my mom was taking two pills every day for her blood pressure, but she saw little improvement. After several revisions to the dosage, her doctor finally figured out that she was taking two pills each morning, rather than one in the morning and one in the evening. That one simple revelation about her dosing schedule had a tremendous impact on her treatment, and yet it took months to figure this out. The MedSignals and Vitality devices have the potential to be useful ways to tracking medication and dosage -- assuming they are designed in a user-friendly way. And if the reports can be printed or viewed online, we can minimize the burden on the physician.
Pulling Together All the Pieces
Let’s start by putting her four-by-seven container to bed. It would be replaced by a clever service provided by Medicine-on-Time, which allows local pharmacists to collate various medications into a single blister pack, grouped by day and time. While the cost of this service is approximately $20 per month, a recent study showed this service resulted in a 66% reduction in the likelihood that elderly patients need to be moved to assisted living facilities, which could save billions of dollars annually.
Then if Medicine-on-Time could be coupled with something like the RFID-embedded technology provided by CYPAK, which automatically records when a particular blister pack gets used, we would actually be getting somewhere. Mom’s compliance data could be viewed by her physician and her collective caretakers, not to mention the pharma and insurance industries.
Of course, once this kind of compliance data is in the cloud, there are lots of things we could do with it. At a basic level, a patient report that combines the Vitality compliance data with the SureScripts medication summary would be hugely beneficial. Then at a more advanced level, if my mom forgot to take her morning medications, she could get a discrete reminder text, email, or phone call, eliminating the need for redundant alarms and flashing wristwatches.
Naturally, all of this data could be visible to her physicians and our family. We could opt-in if we wanted to keep a closer tab on things. And perhaps the pharmacy can keep track of when my mom may be running low on her meds and automatically fulfill next week’s order.
But the big question still remains: Who will pull together all of the pieces? Is this the responsibility of the large health-care providers? Or perhaps the insurance industry? Or should we continue to hold our breath for the federal government to provide some specific guidance? Via dbtmobile 
Smartphones and tablets are transforming the future of health care. Can we really trust them to save lives?
The average auto refractor--that clunky-looking device eye doctors use to pinpoint your prescription--weighs about 40 pounds, costs $10,000, and is virtually impossible to find in a rural village in the developing world. As a result, some half a billion people are living with vision problems, which make it tough to read and work.
What Dr. Smartphone can do for you?
This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of "mHealth," the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that's fast becoming ubiquitous--two in three people worldwide own a cell phone--a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it's cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile. "It's like the human body has developed a new organ," says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they'll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson's disease, and even alerting you when it's prime time to make a baby... 
A growing population, new hospitals and advances in medical technology are set to grow the UAE's medical services market to a healthy Dh31 billion (US$8.4bn) this year.
The amount spent on health care in the UAE is forecast to grow 8.6 per cent this year, although that compares with a 9.3 per cent rise last year to Dh28.8bn, according to market research released last month by Business Monitor International (BMI).
"There are some short-term challenges, but in the long term, the UAE is still one of the most promising markets in the region," said Daniel Rosen, an analyst at BMI and head of the company's pharmaceuticals and healthcare coverage for the Middle East and Africa.
A record of about 3,000 companies will be competing for a slice of the industry's multibillion-dollar revenue pie when the Arab Health exhibition in Dubai opens tomorrow, in its 37th year. Of the [top 4,000 buyers at] the show last year, who mainly represented hospitals and government organisations, each spent an average of $5 million on healthcare products and services.
"There's huge potential, certainly, for a number of sectors," said Lisa Stephens, the executive director of the life sciences division at Informa Exhibitions, which organises Arab Health.
Technology manufacturers, as well as insurers, are expected to benefit from advancements in software and hardware devices, she said.
The rising prevalence of so-called lifestyle diseases, including obesity, diabetes and hypertension, is also increasing demand for care, while the need for additional hospital beds is also high. Generally, developed countries average three beds for every 1,000 people, while as of 2010, the UAE had fewer than two beds, "indicating a large room for future growth potential", according to a report from RNCOS, a market research company.
As local healthcare providers try to curb the number of UAE nationals and expatriates who visit other countries as so-called medical tourists, they have been agreeing partnerships with big brands elsewhere. "That's quite important [and is] hopefully going to help stop patients from going outside [the country]," said Dave Panther, a sales director with Informa Exhibitions.
The Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, a multi-speciality hospital that is a partnership between the Cleveland Clinic in the US and Mubadala Healthcare, is scheduled to open on Sowwah Island next year with a facility that can expand from 360 to 490 beds... U.S. physicians are less likely than doctors in other countries to report expected benefits from using health IT, according to an international survey by Accenture, Healthcare IT News reports.
Rick Ratliff -- global lead for Accenture Connected Health Services -- said the survey suggests that "more needs to be done to bridge the disconnect between physician perceptions and the U.S. federal government's goal of increasing the adoption of meaningful use standards."
Why the Most Under-utilized Resource is the Patient?
A “worldwide genomics revolution” is upon us.
The genomics industry marked a new milestone on Tuesday. As Forbes’ Matthew Herper reported in three separate posts and nearly 100 related Tweets, the two leading manufacturers of DNA sequencing instruments announced almost simultaneously at an investors’ conference that they would introduce new machines this year capable of sequencing an entire human genome in a single day. Life Technologies said its forthcoming Ion Proton machine, which processes DNA on a semiconductor chip, will do it for a cost of $1,000 per genome.
These advances are not just big news for biotech and medicine, but exciting for all Techonomists. They’re proof that the pace of advances in genome sequencing technology has exceeded Moore’s Law. The speed of genome sequencing has far better than doubled every two years since 2003, when the first whole human genome was completed in 13 years’ time at a cost of $3.8 billion. Jonathan Rothberg, inventor of the Ion Proton technology, even hammered home the connection between genomics and computing by sequencing Gordon Moore’s genome last year.
The parallel indicates that, just as revolutionary computing and digital electronics applications have transformed society over the past four decades, innovations spurred by widely available gene sequencing could soon do the same. It was difficult if not impossible for most in 1970 to imagine anything like Skype, Facebook, or Siri, let alone what we would do with desktop computers. And it’s tough today for many to imagine uses outside the biotech industry for cheap and instant hand-held genome sequencers. The blogosphere’s been abuzz since Tuesday’s announcements with complaints that more genomic data won’t be useful until science knows what it all means.
But faster, cheaper sequencing is key to uncovering that knowledge, and to catalyzing innovation in the field. Rothberg says greater access to the technology will lead to necessary crowdsourced genomics investigations and stimulate development of killer apps. For instance, he says, in cancer research, widespread access to DNA sequencing will enable patients or oncologists to share the genomic details of their cancer over time, helping researchers more quickly identify links between mutations and various therapeutic responses. “Only the community can build these correlations,” Rothberg says.
Referring to a global, crowdsourced effort to characterize the genetics of a unique antibiotic resistant strain of E. coli that infected thousands in Europe last year, Rothberg says, “We’ve seen what happens when you enable a community.”
At a community portal hosted by the Ion Torrent website, Rothberg encourages users to collaborate on developing new applications for his semiconductor sequencing instruments. “When the global community gets open access to transformative technology, you get a worldwide genomic revolution,” the site declares. |
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