mHealth- Advances, Knowledge and Patient Engagement

A new wave of wearable computing devices that detect and monitor serious diseases is moving from the laboratory to the market, potentially transforming the treatment of conditions ranging from epilepsy to diabetes and creating business opportunities estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars. 

Unlike popular fitness-tracking devices, such as Fitbit Inc's Fitbit and Jawbone's UP wristbands, these so-called medical-grade wearables require approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration - a rigorous regulatory hurdle that first-generation wearables sought to avoid.

The FDA is preparing for the coming onslaught. 

Bakul Patel, FDA's associate director for digital health, told Reuters the agency is reviewing applications for three new senior health scientist positions focused on digital health.

Long criticized by some health-tech entrepreneurs as a barrier to innovation, the FDA is now seen as an important ally by companies eager to show that their devices can improve peoples' health - and eager to get heath insurers to cover them. 

"Consumers, doctors, payers all want to know if a product provides a clinical benefit," said Julie Papanek of the venture capital firm Canaan Partners, who invests in wearables startups. "Working with the FDA is the one way to get the ability to market that benefit."

A key driver in the new wearables wave is the push for so-called value-based healthcare that is part of the Affordable Care Act. The law gives doctors and hospitals financial incentives for keeping large groups of patients healthy. 

Under the old fee-for-service model, hospitals got paid when patients were hospitalized, noted Jody Ranck, a Washington, D.C.-based healthcare consultant. "Now, you can lose money," he said. Instead, healthcare providers are now eager to collect the data that can help keep people out of the hospital - especially those with chronic diseases. "These wearables are just tools to get the health data," said Ranck.

An avalanche of studies - many of them taking advantage of new data-gathering platforms such as Apple Inc's HealthKit, Google's Google Fit and Samsung's SAMI - are under way on a number of chronic diseases, especially in the area of diabetes. "We're going to see a lot of devices over the next couple of years for every chronic condition of mankind that are FDA-regulated because they all involve a treatment loop," Scripps' Topol said.

A daily health checklist will be sent directly to participants' mobile phone. They will receive reminders about their daily health tasks and can track their progress, including medication adherence and physical activity.

(SPONSORED) As patients increase their usage of mhealth products and services, some providers are working to create effective solutions and programs utilizing this technology to reduce costs, enhance care management and improve outcomes.

Rock Health identified six different categories of digital health use: searching for online health information, comparing health services online, tracking health with a mobile app, tracking health with a wearable device, using telemedicine, and using consumer-facing genetic services.

Twenty percent hadn’t adopted technology in any of the categories, while 2 percent were “super adopters” using all categories or all but one.

To look at the trend of consumer health engagement another way, more than half of the 4,000 internet-connected adults surveyed said they felt responsible for their own health — though that responsibility only seemed to extend so far.

“While 52 percent of consumers strongly agree they are responsible for their own health, only 7 percent would say the same about their willingness to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare,” report authors Malay Gandhi and Teresa Wang wrote, noting that 31 percent say they are “actively taking care of their health.”

A doctor friend once told me the best thing I could do for my health was to turn off my cellphone. But that was before smartphone makers began building health and safety features into their phones. Here are five healthful tricks your phone can do.

Medical ID: Apple’s Medical ID turns any iPhone 4s or newer model into a mobile medical alert bracelet. Tap on your phone’s Health app icon (it’s the white square with a red heart) to find it. Setting up your phone’s medical ID allows doctors or emergency workers to tap and hold the Emergency button on your home screen — even when it’s locked — to access medical conditions, allergies, emergency contacts, blood type and other potentially lifesaving information. (Make sure you enable the “show when locked” switch.)

Dr. Jessica Mega leads Google Life Sciences' ambitious quest to use Big Data to learn what it means to be healthy.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Dr. Jessica Mega, a star cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, swapped coasts early this year to become medical director of Google Life Sciences — the Silicon Valley giant’s new foray into health and medicine.

Before taking a leave from Harvard, Mega led groundbreaking clinical trials that used genetic and molecular signals of disease to study customized treatments for heart patients. That put her in the sweet spot to lead the new firm’s ambitious quest to analyze genomic, molecular, and imaging big data from 10,000 volunteers to figure out what it means to be healthy — the so-called baseline study.

Google Life Sciences — spun off when Google recently reinvented itself as Alphabet, a holding company for Google itself and affiliated entities — has generated buzz in the medical community. Its experts try to turn blue-sky ideas into products by cross-pollinating medicine, engineering, and data science.

Read more: Geneticist Craig Venter helped sequence the human genome. Now he wants yours

They’ve already produced a contact lens for diabetics that continuously monitors glucose in tears. Another prototype “paints” nanoparticles with substances that detect cancer or other abnormalities. As the particles flow through the body, a wrist band — think Fitbit’s smarter sibling — peers into blood vessels to read their findings.

Mega recently sat down with STAT at Google’s offices to talk about the baseline study. The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.

Fitbit activity trackers come with a “manifesto.” Over a photo of a fierce-eyed jogger, the company’s website proclaims: “Every moment matters and every bit makes a big impact. Because fitness is the sum of your life.”

Roughly 20 million people have found that message compelling enough to order a Fitbit. Many more seek out other devices and smartphone apps designed to count their steps, their calories, or their hours of sleep; to help them quit smoking, drinking, or stressing; or to help manage chronic illness. The distillation of daily life into a motivational stream of stats has become a booming industry—the world of the quantified self.

This life-tracking craze has produced something that many clinical researchers covet: a deluge of intimate data about individuals’ moment-to-moment behavior in “the wild,” as researchers sometimes call the world outside the controlled environment of the lab or the clinic. “It’s sort of opening a window into parts of people’s lives we haven’t really had access to before,” says Ida Sim, a physician and informaticist at the University of California, San Francisco.