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Can Mobile Money Enhance Access To Healthcare?

Can Mobile Money Enhance Access To Healthcare? | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

Mobile health (mHealth) deployments have grown dramatically in recent years, particularly in emerging markets, where base-of-the pyramid populations often lack access to basic health services, but possess a mobile phone. However, despite the proliferation of mHealth platforms, many remain limited in scale and are poorly integrated into existing healthcare systems. Introducing mobile financial services (MFS) within these platforms may offer a way to drive reduced costs and enhanced efficiency – resulting in more affordable, inclusive healthcare systems. 

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89% of US physicians would recommend a health app to a patient

89% of US physicians would recommend a health app to a patient | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

Via Andrew Spong
Dave Burianek's comment, May 15, 8:45 AM
I think this is interesting.. and as we think about the whole integrated care delivery model, this data and information will play a critical part. Of those practices that Humana will own or be part of in a significant way, I believe we can make this happen. For those docs with small practices, we would need to find the right motivation to have them leverage this info. Do we offer it to them? such as ipads for usage during an office visit? we have to make it simple yet provide the best information so they could provide the best quality of care.
Scott Normandin's comment, May 16, 10:24 PM
the question begs: is/are applications that make access to health care the domain of the younger generation, or as some would content, are applications an additional level of complication to our senior population. Personal experience from the lens of my parents is that "absent" a vetted and universally adopted application that supports a universal view for all, this may by perceived as the "new best new toy" and fade with time. Our seniors; albeit are digital immigrants, working their way into the development of new technologies clumsily, whereas Gen X/Y find the technology adaptable, available and importantly expendable when the next best thing comes available. What defines consumerization: speed of development and release, or the ability to support end users?
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Healthcare dominates Google's venture investments in 2014

Healthcare dominates Google's venture investments in 2014 | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Healthcare accounted for 36 percent of Google Venture investments in 2014 in 12 companies spanning diagnostics, predictive analytics, telemedicine.
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Disruptors in Medtech Should Not Ignore Compliance | MDDI Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry News Products and Suppliers

Disruptors in Medtech Should Not Ignore Compliance | MDDI Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry News Products and Suppliers | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

The $3 trillion healthcare market has its lure.

By last year, 24 of the Fortune 50 companies had elbowed their way through healthcare’s front door. 

Built around new, disruptive technologies, many new entrants are focused on the device side of the business. However, these new entrants must not overlook one critical element during the development cycle: the web of compliance requirements threaded throughout healthcare.

So far these nontraditional healthcare companies developing medical products have primarily focused on innovative technology. The examples are numerous - Apple has launched a mobile health product capable of monitoring heart rate, Verizon introduced healthcare IT solutions connecting clinicians to their patients, and AT&T has launched mHealth, a platform for mobile application development.

However, as companies venture into deeper waters, they must become fluent in the alphabet soup of government regulatory bodies and industry standards entities that enforce compliance requirements in multiple phases of the product lifecycle. The AMA (American Medical Association); CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services); FDA (Food and Drug Administration); as well as HHS’s OIG (Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General) all have roles in R&D, development, launch and commercialization.

The laws and standards these entities enforce impact nearly all operations of the medtech industry, including commercial practices, development, medical affairs, testing, manufacturing, documentation, billing, reimbursement, risk assessment, traceability, practice ethics, patient rights, referral laws, interactions with doctors and government officials and more.

For companies whose core business is not heavily regulated, developing the infrastructure and culture of compliance can be especially daunting. But failing to proactively plan for and develop a compliance program doesn’t simply risk a company’s entrance into the healthcare space; it can jeopardize a new entrant’s larger organization if liabilities arise that can affect other business units.

Pause, if you will, before that dizzying array of rules and regs, but recognize that, somewhere out there, a potential competitor is already moving along the compliance pathway. Analysis of government filings by PwC’s Health Research Institute identified 24 digital health devices that were cleared by the FDA in just the first 10 months of 2014. So sitting back is no solution  if you are committed to providing better offerings.

What should a new entrant do as it develops new products?

Factor compliance risks into business structureMake sure the compliance organization is scalable andKnow the universe of risks and regulations.

Factor compliance risks into business structure when developing a medical entity
We recommend both legal and physical separation of a medical business from non-medical lines through the creation of a separate business unit. This structure limits the exposure for nonhealthcare business units to healthcare-specific compliance risks.

Consider the case where the company is using the same manufacturing facility to manufacture medical as well as nonmedical products. In a worst-case scenario of noncompliance, were a regulatory agency to shut down a facility’s manufacturing, both medical and non-medical business housed there would be impacted.

In addition to minimizing risk, separation can protect nonmedical business lines by helping streamline operations and simplifying compliance requirements. For example, the separation of medical and nonmedical businesses makes it possible for healthcare-specific training to be mandated only for those working on medical products, instead of forcing the entire corporation through a training program regardless of an employee’s involvement with medical products. Other similar efficiencies may also be found in areas of R&D, manufacturing, sales and marketing.

Make sure your compliance structure is scalable, and comes with a robust oversight mechanism
A robust compliance organization is the single most important mechanism to manage compliance risks. Further, that organization must be scalable beyond the initial, startup nature of the business. Importantly, those growth needs must be considered at early phases of development.

One of the most effective compliance organization structures in PwC’s experience has a single executive in charge of compliance requirements reporting directly to the head of the medical business unit. This supports operational simplicity while outlining clear roles and responsibilities at the executive level.

This also provides an independent, internal evaluation of potential risk issues and minimizes conflicts of interest that could come from reporting to other departments. In this way, potential compliance issues can be raised to the proper level, and receive the proper attention, without being unduly influenced by financial or other business metrics.

Know the universe of risks and regulations applicable to your health business
New entrants need to thoroughly analyze applicable compliance risks and regulations. Some compliance requirements depend on product complexity while others depend on the target customer.

Here is a list of industry compliance standards and regulatory guidance that is a great place to start in order to develop a best-fit risk control framework:

AMA Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 8.061 – Gifts to Physicians from IndustryAdvaMed Code of Ethics on Interactions with Healthcare Professionals (revised 2009)Enforcement Lessons: Settlement AgreementsFederal Sentencing Guidelines Chapter 8 Organizational Guidelines (revised 2004, 2010)HHS’s OIG Compliance Program Guidance for Medical Device ManufacturersOther HHS OIG Guidance: OIG WorkPlan, Advisory Opinions, Fraud & Alert BulletinsSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; and21 CFR Regulations: Part 11, 803, 806, & 820.

There are real ramifications of noncompliance.  A failure in this regard can result in millions of dollars of direct losses as well as significant collateral damage to the company. Noncompliance may also impact timeline for launching products, even costing companies their first-mover advantage.

At the end of the day, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to address all compliance challenges. Each company needs to determine what is best for them, grounding that decision on factors such as operational size, risk exposure and the type of products they will be introducing into the market.

The good news is that with the proper business structure, a scalable compliance organization, and knowledge of the risk landscape, compliance need not throttle a company’s innovation pipeline. Indeed, compliance protects the company, prevents destructive risk, and can provide competitive advantages.

--By James S. Varelis, Principal, PwC Health Industries, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences sector


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Reports: Mobile Apps Capture Most Internet Time, Exceed TV

Reports: Mobile Apps Capture Most Internet Time, Exceed TV | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Mobile is the top attention medium in the US. That's been confirmed by Flurry, Nielsen, ad network InMobi and once again by comScore, which affirmed to Int
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Why We’re Getting Patient Engagement Backwards | The Health Care Blog

Why We’re Getting Patient Engagement Backwards | The Health Care Blog | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |











Joseph Smith, MD. PhD (@JoeSmithMD), a cardiologist, cardiac electrophysiologist and engineer, is chief medical and science officer of theGary and Mary West Health Institute (@WestHealth), an independent, nonprofit medical research organization that works with healthcare providers and research institutions to create new, more effective ways of delivering care.

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How To Track Your Life With Apple Health

How To Track Your Life With Apple Health | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
How To Track Your Life With Apple Health14,2363David NieldProfileFollowDavid NieldFiled to: Apple HealthiOS Tuesday 11:30amShare to KinjaShare to FacebookShare to TwitterGo to permalink


We've already taken a look at some of the features and capabilities of Google Fit, and Apple's own activity-tracking platform is now up and running too. Find out how you can use Apple's brand new app to monitor your daily exercise, improve your overall health, aggregate data from different sources and store your medical information.

The Apple Health app appears in iOS 8 on the iPhone 4s or later and the fifth generation iPod Touch. It will use the data automatically pulled from the sensors in your phone to try and build up a picture of your activity and your habits, but you can plug in third-party devices and services as well: Endomondo, Runtastic, Garmin Connect, Nutrino, Qardio and dozens of others all plug into Health and the underlying HealthKit platform in some way (though there are some big name holdouts).

Automatic monitoring


Open up the Health app on a new iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus and you'll see that steps, distance covered and flights climbed are all being tracked for you courtesy of the M8 motion coprocessor built into the device. If you've hooked up Health with some other apps and data sources, you can also see statistics on calories burned, weight, heart rate and just about everything else here.

The Day, Week, Month and Year buttons at the top of the screen let you see your data over a shorter or longer period of time. Tap on any chart for a more detailed breakdown; the subsequent screen lets you show or hide graphs on the main dashboard, add data points manually, and choose which data is included in the overview. Follow the Show All Data link and you can see exactly what information was recorded when.

Apple Health records so much information that you're probably going to want to limit the number of graphs that are shown on the dashboard and focus solely on the statistics that are most important to you. It's possible to dig down into any of the other screens at any time, if you need to, though checking up on your progress over time isn't particularly easy to do.

Health Data


Tap the Health Data icon at the foot of the interface to reveal all of the different types of information that Apple's app can keep track of. This covers a wide range of data points, from your date of birth to the number of times you've fallen over. In each case data can be added manually or fed through a connected app or gadget. If you're looking for something in particular, make use of the search field at the top.

For example, tap Sleep and then Sleep Analysis to see how much shut-eye you're getting at the moment. If you haven't connected anything that's able to measure this data automatically, you can log the time you've spent asleep and in bed manually: Select Add Data Point and fill in the relevant details. Toggle the Share on Dashboard button to add the chart to your overview screen.

The other sections in Health Data work along similar lines, though of course in the long-term you want to be piping this information in automatically rather than constantly typing out everything that's happening. The number of apps compatible with Health and HealthKit is growing, though—take Instant Heart Rate, for example, for measuring your heart rate with your phone's camera, or 7 Minute Workout for giving you a motivational prod.

Third-party services


Install an app that works with Health—such as the aforementioned Instant Heart Rate—and somewhere in the app will be an option to share the data it collects with Apple's framework. With this feature activated you should see data begin to be collated: Tap through into the type of data on the Health Data screen to see the information that has been logged and by which app.

All of these apps will work slightly differently, which is why Apple Health has so much potential in terms of being the central focal point for data coming in from multiple sensors and apps. Some apps will send data to Health, some will take data from it, and some will do both. Check the help information supplied with the app involved if you're not sure.

Jawbone's UP app is one of the more high-profile ones to introduce Health compatibility, and it can both read from and write to the Health app. Essentially, that means you can use your UP wristband with Apple Health, or try out the UP app without a wearable using the data pulled from Health and your iPhone's sensors. To see all of your connected apps in one place, go into Health and tap the Sources button: From the list of entries you can manage which sorts of data are shared (Sleep Analysis and Steps in the case of the UP app) and in which direction.

Your Medical ID


The last section in the Health app is Medical ID and it's here that you can store vital information such as allergies and your organ donor status. Choose to Create Medical ID from the front screen and you can enter details of medical conditions, your age, height and weight, any medications you're currently taking, your blood type and an emergency contact who can be called in the case of an emergency.

It's in an emergency where this Medical ID could be the most useful. You'll notice a Show When Locked toggle switch at the top of the screen, and when this is switched on a link to your ID will appear on your device's lock screen. Whoever picks up your phone can tap on the Emergency button then the Medical ID one to find all of the information that you've left. If you'd rather it was kept hidden, disable the feature.

Apple Health still has a long way to go. Some better data analysis would be welcome, for example, and there's no easy way to go back through your statistics, but it's a confident start and one that's currently more comprehensive than Google's comparable offering. If you're an iPhone user then it's automatic monitoring capabilities might just be enough to get you to take your health more seriously.

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10 Ideas That Are About To Revolutionize Medicine

10 Ideas That Are About To Revolutionize Medicine | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

More More: Health Medicine Innovation Future
10 Ideas That Are About To Revolutionize Medicine

    Erin Brodwin

    Nov. 5, 2014, 6:00 AM


elizabeth holmes theranosCourtesy Theranos

The future of medicine has arrived.

No, we're not talking about robot surgeons, implantable memory-augmentation devices, or doctors wearing Google Glass. The game-changing innovations on this list are more than distant dreams or inventions no one really knows what to with yet. Most should be available as early as 2015.

Every year, the Cleveland Clinic comes up with a list of new devices or treatments that are expected to help improve our daily lives and reduce our risks of developing disease. Only time will tell whether their considerable promise pans out.

Here are the top 10 new medications, treatments, and technologies to watch for in 2015, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
1. Mobile Stroke Unit

What if there were a drug that could lessen the brain damage caused by a stroke by targeting the blood clot that caused it and breaking it up?

As it turns out, there is. It's called tPA, and the faster it's given after a stroke, the safer and more effective it is. Here's the problem: Most people don't get the drug in time, and it can only be administered via IV. Lack of access to quick treatment can have dire consequences — someone in the US dies from stroke every four minutes.

Mobile stroke treatment units solve this problem by taking tPA directly to the patient. The units are essentially ambulances outfitted with everything health professionals need to treat a patient suffering from a stroke and staffed by an onboard paramedic, a critical care nurse, and a CT technologist. A broadband video link allows the onboard team to virtually contact a hospital stroke neurologist to guide treatment.
2. Dengue Vaccinepolio vaccine afghanistan childMohammad Ismail/Reuters

Close to half the world's population is at risk for developing dengue, a disease characterized by high fever, nausea and vomiting, and pain behind the eyes and in the muscles, bones, and joints. The virus kills some 20,000 people each year and is spread by mosquitoes. One of the biggest challenges in creating a vaccine against dengue is that it is caused by five different related, but not identical, strains. Even protection from one type will still leave you susceptible to the four other forms.

But scientists have reason to be hopeful this year.

A vaccine that just went through the last phase of testing was found to be 60% effective, on average, in protecting people against the disease, and 95.5% protective against the disease in its most severe form, as dengue hemorrhagic fever. While the vaccine is far from perfect, "it’s the best dengue vaccine so far," MIT immunologist Jianzhu Chen told The Verge. The new vaccine also reduced the number of people who needed to be hospitalized by bringing down the onset of fever by 80%. Fever is one of the virus's most potentially fatal complications, especially when it occurs in children under age 10. The vaccine is expected to be available in early 2015.
3. One-Drop Blood Testing

Bye, bye, needles.

Instead of getting blood drawn the conventional way, a new technology will let doctors — or pharmacists, even — run hundreds of tests with a single drop of blood from a finger prick. While a standard lipid panel, one of the most common blood tests done in the US, can cost between $10 and $100 depending on where it's done, the current advertised cost of the new test is $2.99.
4. Better Cholesterol-Reducing Drugs

Too much cholesterol in the blood can collect inside our arteries and plug them up, causing heart disease and death. While many people use statins, a special type of drug that can help lower cholesterol, some people's cholesterol levels simply don't respond to treatment.

There's a new type of injectable drug just for those patients called PCSK9. In studies, the drug has been successful at reducing cholesterol levels in people whose high cholesterol levels didn't respond to statins.

The best part? No trip to the hospital or clinic required. The drug can be injected at home, like insulin, and only requires one or two treatments a month. The FDA is expected to approve the first PCSK9 in 2015.

Cancer cellsjovan vitanovski/Shutterstock

5. Precision Cancer Treatment

Chemotherapy and radiation can save lives, but the intense treatment harms healthy cells in the process of taking down cancerous ones. As a result, many cancer patients experience side effects ranging from hair loss to crippling nausea and extreme fatigue.

But a new class of drugs targets cancer cells and leaves healthy tissues alone.

The drugs are a form of precision treatment that combines antibodies — the molecules the immune system uses to locate and stop harmful viruses — with a powerful toxin that kills a cancerous cell from within.

While these drugs, called antibody-drug conjugates, won't be a cure-all, more than 24 are in clinical trials for solid tumors and blood cancer. Some that have been designed to treat other types of cancer, including HER2-positive breast cancer and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, are already available.
6. Wireless Pacemaker

The first pacemaker was implanted in 1958. Since then, doctors have continued using pacemakers connected electrically to the heart via a complex system of tiny wires. Unfortunately, those wires can break or get dislodged in the body. Their insulation can also become cracked and lead to an infection.

This new pacemaker is wireless, 10% of the size of a conventional pacemaker (about the size of a large vitamin), and is implanted directly in the heart — no lengthy surgery required.

Doctors simply use a catheter in a leg vein to steer the device into the heart, a process that takes about 20 minutes. The lithium-battery-powered device lasts up to 7 years and is currently undergoing late stage clinical trials. It was first implanted into a patient in Ohio in February.

8. New Medications For Deadly Lung Disease

Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis is a deadly, untreatable disease whose cause remains unknown. Scar tissue builds up inside the lungs, thickening its tissues and making breathing difficult. Many people diagnosed with IPF only live another 3-5 years; more than 30,000 Americans get such a diagnosis each year.

Two new drugs found to reduce scar tissue and improve lung function in patients got FDA approval in October. One appears to work by calming inflammation while the other blocks a protein that tells the lungs to make scar tissue. We don't yet know if these drugs will work for all patients, but they're the first that show promise in slowing the disease's progression.
9. Cheaper, More Convenient Breast Cancer Treatment

Close to a quarter million people will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, according to the American Cancer Society; 40,000 women will die from the disease. Radiation therapy, the leading treatment used to beat back the disease, can be inconvenient and expensive. As a result, some people simply stop getting treatment, according to researchers at the Cleveland Clinic.

The Cleveland Clinic estimates that intraoperative radiation therapy, which would involve giving a patient a single dose of radiation after surgery to remove tumors, would cost one-fifth the sticker price of traditional radiation treatment, which can sometimes involve up to 20 doses.
10. A Pill That Protects The Heart From Failing

Nearly 55,000 people die each year when their hearts become too weak to pump blood. Today, most people at risk of heart failure treat their condition with two drugs: ACE inhibitors and beta blockers, which work by opening up the blood vessels and making it easier for the heart to push blood throughout the body. But they're not a perfect fix.

A new drug could further reduce the risk of heart failure. In a study of 8,000 patients, researchers testing the new treatment, called Angiotensin Receptor Neprilysin Inhibitor (ARNI), had to stop testing because the patients receiving the new drug had far better health outcomes than those taking traditional drugs. Compared to people taking traditional heart failure drugs, people getting ARNI were 20% less likely to be hospitalized for heart failure and 16% less likely to die from any cause during the study.

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Matt Coleman's curator insight, December 19, 3:24 AM

Let's hope some of these amazing new options make it to market in 2015

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Santé : la vidéo, média par excellence ? - Club Digital Santé

Santé : la vidéo, média par excellence ? - Club Digital Santé | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Santé : la vidéo, média par excellence ?Posted on 04/12/2014 by Club Digital Santé wrote in Tribune de la semaine. It has 1 Comment.

La vidéo est aujourd’hui le média le plus plébiscité par les internautes à travers le monde. De nombreuses initiatives utilisant ce média fleurissent dans le domaine de la santé. Décryptage d’une tendance croissante.

La vidéo est aujourd’hui très présente sur les supports digitaux et notamment dans le domaine de la santé. Aujourd’hui l’impact de ce format de communication est beaucoup plus important que les canaux traditionnels comme l’affichage, la presse ou les spots radio. Les différents acteurs du monde de la santé l’ont bien compris avec le déploiement de nombreuses initiatives.

Un formidable outil de prévention et de sensibilisation

Vous n’avez pas pu passer à côté de cette vidéo de prévention de l’association « Cancer Testiculaire Canadien » autour du dépistage du cancer des testicules qui a battu les records d’audience la semaine dernière (+1 millions de vues sur Vimeo et YouTube) :

Cet exemple nous montre que ce canal de communication est aujourd’hui un formidable outil de prévention qui est de plus en plus utilisé par les associations de patients, de santé publique et l’ensemble des acteurs de santé.

Autre exemple récent, celui de l’Association Valentin Haüy qui a proposé aux internautes de vivre certaines situations rencontrées par les aveugles et malvoyants au travers d’une expérience inédite : « 5 jours dans le noir » :


Web série : format prisé par la pharma

L’industrie pharmaceutique a pris conscience de l’impact du média vidéo. Parmi les différents formats vidéo, les web séries sont très prisées. Ce format de vidéo est utilisé pour susciter l’intérêt des internautes. Il s’agit d’une série de vidéo, le plus souvent sur un ton décalé et humoristique pour mémoriser les messages. L’identification à des personnages, à une histoire permet une meilleure adhésion au message et favorise la viralité des vidéos.

Parmi les dernières web séries santé diffusées sur la toile, « Il paraît que la pilule… » du laboratoire Biogaran, web série autour de la contraception orale pour chasser les idées reçues et répondre aux questions des jeunes filles :


Les Entreprises du Médicament utilisent également ce format depuis plusieurs années pour sensibiliser le grand public sur les problématiques liées aux médicaments.

Web TV : véritable vecteur de communication

De nombreuses Web TV, notamment via la plateforme YouTube, ont émergées dans le domaine de la santé. Ce canal de communication représente un relais d’information, de mobilisation et de pédagogie pour une entreprise, une association ou un établissement hospitalier. Il permet de centraliser l’ensemble de sa production vidéo et de la faire durer dans le temps. Dans le domaine de la santé, de nombreuses associations de patients possèdent leur Web TV, utilisé comme vecteur de communication pour des campagnes de sensibilisation ou des partages de témoignages. On peut citer en exemple l’association Renaloo avec Renaloo TV ou l’association AMFE.

Les établissements de santé ont également compris l’importance de ce média dans leur relation avec les patients. L’AP-HM a lancé dès début 2013 une Web TV CancérO destinée à informer et rassurer les patients atteints de cancer. L’hôpital Necker-Enfants malades propose également sa Web TV avec de nombreuses vidéos présentant l’établissement, des témoignages de patients, professionnels de santé…

Nous l’avons vu, aujourd’hui la vidéo est la reine du web. Quel canal arrivera à détrôner ce média ?

Rémy Teston

Digital Health Marketing Manager
Buzz e-santé
Retouvez-moi sur twitter et sur LinkedIn.

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5 digital health trends you'll see in 2015

5 digital health trends you'll see in 2015 | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

2014 has been a huge year for health tech. According to digital health incubator StartUp Health, digital health funding in the first three quarters of 2014 has already surpassed $5 billion, close to double what was invested in all of 2013 ($2.8 billion).

"Digital health funding for the year is on track to double last year's total," said Unity Stoakes, co-founder and president of StartUp Health. "Some trends we're watching include a growing corporate interest in digital health, more global cross-pollination of ideas, as well as increasing health consumerism as people move into the driver's seat when it comes to their care."

With this kind of capital pouring into the market, the health tech space should be exciting to watch in the coming years, but here's a sneak peek at what's coming in 2015.

1. Wearables for the ear

Tired of clip-on trackers and bracelets? Your next wearable device just might be hooked around your ear.

"Due to the proximity to the temporal artery,

 devices worn on the ear can conduct completely unobtrusive, passive monitoring
devices worn on the ear can conduct completely unobtrusive, passive monitoringand offer far more precise measurements," says Dr. Vahram Mouradian, founder and CTO of Sensogram Technologies. "Moreover, they can deliver a wealth of wellness information, including real time blood pressure, respiration rate and oxygen saturation, in addition to the typical readings of heart rate or steps taken."

We've already seen a few of companies introduce ear buds with basic health monitoring, such as IriverOn and FreeWavz. Watch for increasing sophistication in ear-based devices over the coming year.

For example, Sensogram's SensoTRACK — slated for general availability in March 2015 — is an elegantly designed device that fits snugly on your ear, where it measures heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and respiration rate. It also counts steps and calories burned, while sensing your speed, activity level, geolocation, altitude, body posture and pace.

Also keep an eye out for BitBite, the first ear-based device that automatically tracks your eating habits and helps you improve them with real-time dietary advice. The BitBite device fits comfortably in your ear and learns when, where and how you eat. It then analyzes this data and gently nudges you to make adjustments, such as slowing down your eating pace or drinking more water. BitBite doles out its advice either by "whispering" in your ear or by alerting you through the BitBite smartphone app.

BitBite just launched its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign on November 11, with general availability expected in Q2 of 2015.

2. Sweat sensor strips

Want even more insight into what's going on in your body? You'll soon be able to track your internal biochemistry with a simple biosensor strip.

Electrozyme is developing a printed, flexible strip sensor that inserts into the back of your wearable device and measures the metabolic substances secreted in your sweat, allowing you to track your electrolyte balance, hydration level, muscle exertion and physical performance. According to Electrozyme, the chemical analysis enabled by its disposable biosensors can give people actual insights into their metabolism that go way beyond steps and heart rate.

See also: Is That App FDA Approved? Mobile Health Tech Falls Into Gray Area

"The advantage of tracking sweat using chemical sensors is that it gives insight into your body chemistry and how it is responding to your workout that is not available using traditional sensors," says Jared Tangney, Ph.D., co-founder and COO of Electrozyme, LLC. "Chemical sensors open up a whole new world of information that was previously never available in wearable devices."

Tangney sees a range of different applications for this technology, including letting you know when it's time to drink some water — something most of us probably need: according to some reports, up to 75% of Americans may be chronically dehydrated.

3. Smartphone case devices

You're already carrying around a smartphone with a protective case. Why shouldn't it do double-duty as a medical device?

"We're starting to see some initial forays into using smartphones and their cases to measure medical conditions that previously required specialized equipment," says Joanne Rohde, CEO and founder of Axial Exchange. "Imagine an electrocardiogram anywhere — not just at your doctor's office — or a DIY blood test to check your glucose right in your pocket. Some of these innovations are already available, but there are many more to come."

One of the first to hit the market was the AliveCor heart monitor, an FDA-approved iPhone case that allows you to record ECGs and heart rate on the go. You can rest it on your fingers or chest to record an ECG in 30 seconds, and know right away if atrial fibrillation is detected, which could be an early indicator of stroke.

In 2015, watch for more such devices to become available as they pass through the FDA approval process.

For example, Azoi's Wello is a mobile health tracking device which doubles as an iPhone case and is currently in the process of getting FDA approval. It can measure vitals such as ECG, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation levels, respiration and temperature.

4. Prescription-only apps

There are already thousands of health apps you can find on Google Play or iTunes. Soon, some of these apps may require a prescription.

One early example is WellDoc's BlueStar, the first "Mobile Prescription Therapy" for people living with type 2 diabetes. The prescription-only app allows people to input data about their glucose levels, diet, exercise, well-being and other factors, which BlueStar automatically analyzes to give the patient immediate guidance and feedback. BlueStar also analyzes the data for the patient's physician and allows the patient to provide a detailed summary of their progress to the physician for review prior to or during office visits.

While you might not see a flood of prescription-only apps hit the app store in January — launching one requires FDA approval, clinical trials, insurance reimbursement and more — WellDoc's co-founder and chief medical officer Dr. Suzanne Sysko Clough says we should "expect to see more Mobile Prescription Therapies for many major chronic diseases over the coming years."

5. Healthier lighting

Finally, ever wonder why you have trouble drifting off after staring at your iPad in bed? The culprit may be the blue light emitted from your device — the part of the light spectrum that causes the biggest changes to your internal circadian rhythm, which can disrupt your sleep and impact your health.

"People who don't get enough sleep have trouble being productive, controlling their emotions and coping with change. They're also at greater risk of major health issues such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke," says Cameron Postelwait of Sewell Development Corporation, developer of the low-blue-light Drift light bulb, which launched in May of this year.

Postelwait believes that in 2015, we'll see a much bigger focus on the effects that artificial light has on people's health, as well as new product innovations to address the problem, particularly in clinical environments and hospitals.

"A patient in unstable condition requires nurse visits all through the night. Every time the nurse enters the room, he activates some kind of lighting to help him check on the patient's condition and to give medication. This throws off the patient's natural circadian rhythm, which not only disturbs sleep, but may also impact immune response," explains Postelwait. "There's a huge need for lighting that either has an absence of blue light or a way to change the amount of blue light that the patient receives during the day or night."

 But while too much bright light might be harmful at night, too little during the day can also bring you down.
But while too much bright light might be harmful at night, too little during the day can also bring you down.Luckily, there are folks hard at work to add some sunshine to your day.

For example, GoodLux Technology recently launched SunSprite, the first wearable device to track daily bright light intake. According to GoodLux, scientific studies have linked bright light exposure to health benefits such as better energy, mood and sleep.

"There's so much focus on nutrition and fitness that mental wellness is often overlooked. Bright light sets the body's internal clock, which controls essential components of mental wellness: hormones, energy levels, mood, digestion and sleep," says GoodLux CEO Ed Likovich. "Three out of four of our early adopters report improvements in these essential components to mental wellness."

The solar-powered SunSprite boasts dual sensors that measure visible and UV light and lets users know when they've absorbed just the right amount of bright light to maintain health, while also providing tracking for monitoring UV exposure.

Via Jean-Pierre Blanger
more... - Mark Merolli's curator insight, December 18, 8:55 PM

Good read as we approach 2015

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mHealth Wearables

mHealth Wearables | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
A wearable to help measure stress, epileptic seizures, activity, and sleep | MIT spinoff Empatica, which is developing a medical-quality wearable device to monitor epileptic seizures* and alert caregivers, has launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding...
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Gartner Predicts By 2017, 30 Percent of Smart Wearables Will Be Inconspicuous to the Eye

Gartner Predicts By 2017, 30 Percent of Smart Wearables Will Be Inconspicuous to the Eye | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
As the smart wearables market continues to grow and evolve, Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2017, 30 percent of smart wearables will be completely unobtrusive to the eye.
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Intel is swarming wearables as part of its Internet of Things strategy

Intel is swarming wearables as part of its Internet of Things strategy | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
December 9, 2014 1:00 PM
Dean Takahashi 

Intel missed being the leader in mobile tech, but it doesn’t want to miss the wearables wave. So the company is investing heavily in components for wearables, and that strategy is integrated with the company’s larger mission of providing tech for the Internet of Things (IoT), or connected everyday objects.

Not only will Intel design components for wearables, but it’s also designing its own wearable devices and partnering with the fashion houses and retailers that will sell them. Those wearables will provide a stream of data to Intel’s Internet of Things infrastructure, which will analyze and make sense of the data so that you can get insight into your life, such as how much you need to exercise or sleep.

“We consider wearables to be personal IoT,” said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Devices Group, in a media briefing today in San Francisco. “They are an expression of yourself, and how you want to be seen. At the same time, we’re trying to make them smart and useful.”

Above: Intel’s Mike Bell

Image Credit: Intel

Intel expects there will be 50 billion IoT devices in the market by 2020, and 400 million of those will be wearables. Intel has built its IoT platform to support wearables as an end-to-end solution. The wearable app partner gets everything from chips to a dashboard portal that tells you how a device is being used.

Bell added, “Everything is getting smart. The number keeps going up and up every time you see these surveys. Wearables are a small part of it, but it is still a very significant number.”

Intel has created partnerships with watch maker Fossil, fashion brand Opening Ceremony, and eyeglass maker Luxxotica.

“These non-traditional players are realizing that these things are getting smart, technology is at the point where it can be embedded in their devices, and thankfully we struck partnerships with them to make the best wearables on the planet,” Bell said.

Intel is focusing on IoT markets such as consumer, industrial, and health care. And wearables fit within each of those segments. Earlier this year, Intel acquired Basis Science, the maker of a line of fitness and sleep-tracking smartwatches. Such devices will eventually be used to identify you, he said. Intel has also made a pair of headphones that records your heart rate and sends the data to the cloud.

“Wearable devices will provide an interesting way to interact with the world around them,” he said. “It could be an interesting way to do away with badges. Wearable devices could become a way to identify you.”

Bell said the market is divided into trackers for fitness under $200, smartwatches and bracelets at around $200 to $400, and then head-worn devices such as Google Glass at about $1,000.

“We think there has to be a blending of fashion and technology for this to really take off,” he said. “The best thing about Google Glass is that it has people talking about the concept,” such as what is acceptable when wearing a recording device in public.

Above: Intel’s view of wearables

Image Credit: Intel


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Telemedicine Adoption Picking Up Pace among Hospital Executives, Survey Says

Telemedicine Adoption Picking Up Pace among Hospital Executives, Survey Says | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Thanks to incentives under the Affordable Care Act, more hospital executives are offering telemedicine technologies in hospitals-but reimbursement is still the primary hurdle, according to the 2014 Telemedicine Survey by Foley and Lardner LLP.posted: Wednesday 10th of December 2014 by Shiva Gopal Reddy

Despite reimbursement and regulatory challenges, executives in the healthcare industry are bullish on adopting telemedicine practices, according to the 2014 Telemedicine Survey Report by Foley and Lardner LLP.

An overwhelming majority of the 57 C-suite executives surveyed for the study believe that telemedicine will increasingly play a key role in transforming an industry that is already ripe for disruption.

Hospital Executives Are Bullish On Telemedicine

More than 90% of the respondents of the survey said that their healthcare organizations are either implementing or have already begun developing a telemedicine program.

84% believe that offering meaningful telemedicine services is very critical to their success as a healthcare organization. Only a miniscule 3% considered telemedicine as unimportant for healthcare.

64% of respondents are already offering remote patient monitoring services54% are offering store and forward technology52% are offering real-time interaction capabilities39% are offering mHealth technologies of one form or the other.

Little more than half of the participants (51 percent) of the survey said that their organization has put in place telemedicine practice standards and guidelines for delivering telemedicine services.

The Affordable Care Act Is Driving Telemedicine Adoption

As the Affordable Care Act shifts the focus of the healthcare delivery model from one that pays for services to one that reimburses for positive patient outcomes, healthcare organizations have been under increasing pressure to share risks, and rewards, for keeping their patients safe.

With organizations clamoring for solutions to deliver healthcare services in a cost-effective manner, telemedicine is being viewed as an attractive means to increase the efficiency of the operations and create multiple touch points for patients.

Since telemedicine plays a role in reducing excessive numbers of hospital readmissions and hospital-acquired conditions, healthcare organizations can hope to avoid the penalties imposed by the ACA model.

50% of the survey respondents cited improving the quality of care as their prime motivating factor in adopting telemedicine practices. 18% ranked reaching new patients as their key motive, which underlines the potential of telemedicine in counseling patients wherever they may be. 11% of respondents each ranked operational efficiency and increasing revenue or profitability as their motivation in implementing telemedicine capabilities.

“In the post-Obamacare paradigm, providers bear a much greater responsibility for the sustained wellness of their patients,” said Nathaniel Lacktman, a partner and health care lawyer at Foley. “Telemedicine offers new ways for providers to manage this new level of risk and keep their patients healthy, happy and out of the hospital.”

But Reimbursement Is a Barrier for Greater Adoption

With telemedicine disrupting the way medicine is practiced, healthcare organizations find it difficult to navigate through regulations and reimbursement policies to get paid for services rendered outside the traditional sphere of doctor-patient interaction.

41% of executives said that they are not being reimbursed for all telemedicine services.21% reported that Medicare covers too few telemedicine services. 20% said that managed care companies pay much lower rates for telemedicine services than for in-person care. 18% expressed their disappointment in state laws failing to mandate that commercial coverage companies pay for telemedicine services.

Other than reimbursement issues, nearly half of the respondents (48%) were concerned about convincing and ensuring their physicians that telemedicine is a credible, high-quality supplement to practice.

36% of healthcare executives report that making physicians feel that their participation in telemedicine is adequately compensated is a significant factor regarding physicians’ acceptance of telemedicine.

Despite these concerns, telemedicine adoption is set to soar, believes Larry Vernaglia, chair of Foley’s Health Care Practice.

“The reimbursement landscape is already changing, and there are many viable options for getting compensated for practicing telemedicine. The smartest thing organizations can do now is to continue developing programs, and be ready for the law to catch up - because it will.” 

 Shiva Gopal Reddy has a Bachelor's degree in Physics and a Master's in Applied Psychology and writes frequently on the latest research, impact, happenings and trends in digital health technology.

Via Philippe Marchal/Pharma Hub
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Review of UCSF’s musculoskeletal medical exam app

Review of UCSF’s musculoskeletal medical exam app | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
A great evidenced based medical app that helps you perform various MSK exams effectively The post Review of UCSF’s musculoskeletal medical exam app appeared first on iMedicalApps.
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Why Virtual Reality Doesn't Need a Killer App to Get Huge | WIRED

Why Virtual Reality Doesn't Need a Killer App to Get Huge | WIRED | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

On a frosty December morning in 1783, some 400,000 people gathered in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to see the world’s first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon. Jacques Charles and his assistant, Nicolas-Louis Robert, ascended 1,800 feet into the sky accompanied by a mercury barometer, some sandbags, and a few bottles of champagne.

“Nothing will ever quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off,” Charles later wrote. “I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles for ever.”

Back on the ground, feelings were more ambivalent. Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, watched the scene from his carriage. A cynical companion remarked, “What’s the use of a balloon?” Franklin, aghast, replied, “What’s the use of a newborn baby?”

His point: You’re not thinking big enough.

When Joseph Banks, then the president of England’s Royal Society, first got word in a letter from Franklin about the balloons, he too demanded to know their practical applications. There were some obvious implementations—geographical mapping and military reconnaissance sprung first to mind—but he questioned whether ballooning could otherwise “prove beneficial either to society or science.” Banks proposed one such practical use-case: a system using balloons to reduce the load on horse-pulled wagons. The idea was that broad-wheeled wagons, which normally would require eight horses to draw, would need just two using such a method.

Franklin, with a bit more foresight, argued ballooning could “pave the way to some discoveries in Natural Philosophy of which at present we have no conception.” He compared ballooning to “magnetism and electricity, of which the first experiments were mere matters of amusement.”

The Small Thinking That Plagued Ballooning Also Plagues VR

Like those hydrogen balloons, small thinking has plagued the development of one of today’s flashiest technologies, virtual reality devices. When Oculus, the company that (literally) kickstarted the new VR revolution, originally pitched its device as a “headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever,” hardly anyone—least of all gamers—questioned the idea that VR should be anything other than a high-end gaming accessory. Like a new graphics card or a better TV, it would be a logical, utilitarian improvement to current display technology for games—a horse-drawn carriage, now improved with balloons.

We’ve had a few years to get used to the idea of VR, and some have started getting a little more high-minded about its possibilities. WIRED has been eager to lead the charge, as when it declared a few months ago that VR will “change gaming, movies, TV, music, design, medicine, sex, sports, art, travel, social networking, education, and reality.” Of course, it always has been the tendency of magazines to breathlessly celebrate new technologies. In a 1788 article, Gentleman’s Magazine (the first periodical to use the word “magazine” to describe itself) celebrated the advent of hydrogen ballooning as “the most magnificent and astonishing discovery that has been made for many ages, or perhaps since the creation.” Time, Gentleman’s Magazine assured its readers, would reveal the utility of ballooning experiments.

Now, though, even the most breathlessly optimistic VR fanboys can’t help but ask: What will be “the killer app” for these new devices? (Palmer Luckey’s Franklin-esque response? “What’s the real world’s killer app?”)

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Update: In 2015, interesting digital health collaborations on tap for pharma

Qualcomm LIfe General Manager Rick Valencia said we'll see a lot more collaboration between pharma companies next year as integrate digital health solutions.
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CellScope’s iPhone-enabled otoscope, remote consultation service launches for CA parents

CellScope’s iPhone-enabled otoscope, remote consultation service launches for CA parents | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Parents in California who have children who get chronic ear infections will soon have a more convenient way to get their kids care.

San Francisco-based CellScope, a Khosla Ventures-backed Rock Health alum, has begun taking preorders for its FDA registered smartphone-enabled otoscope, called Oto Home.

Via ChemaCepeda
ChemaCepeda's curator insight, December 18, 6:16 AM

Otoscopios para padres conectados  con el profesional vía telemedicina ¿qué os parece la idea?

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Physician communities’ map: reaching doctors in the virtual world

Physician communities’ map: reaching doctors in the virtual world | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

The social media landscape is constantly evolving. Given the strong interest and comments received from our members, we have published an updated version of the map.

The proliferation of small and large communities is the result ofphysicians’ increasing need to share ideas and discuss clinical cases with colleagues in every part of the world. 
The analysis highlights a very complex social landscape, with a very strong community presence in the US, but also a significant presence of more or less large local communities almost worldwide.

The more the number of communities grow, the greater the need to create stronger niche communities, increasingly unfolding the landascape of physician communities. Trying to find some differentiating features in theaggregation trend of physician communities, we have identified 3 main features:

SpecialtyLocationTrustworthy Provider

Specialized communities

“Specialized” communities tend to be a smaller group and represent the long tail of physician communities, with a small but very specialized number of subscribers. In this type of aggregation the common feature is the professional specialty and consequently a common specific area of interest. In the radiology field, for example, there are many examples of specialized communities like or

Location specific communities

Location specific communities usually represent an aggregation of physicians that come from thesame country or speak the same language.

These kinds of communities are generally larger than the specialized ones, since they tend to include all physician specialities.

Usually physicians turn to location specific communities for two main reasons. The first is language, especially in Europe, where due to the multitude of different European languages, localized communities are proliferating quickly. The second is related to local roles and rules shared by physicians coming from the same country with regard to their medical or practice management issues.

Examples of localized communities are DocCheck in Germany and in UK that represent the top European physician communities.

What is also interesting is the presence of physician communities in emerging markets. In China for example the community has 1,7 million members, of which 50% are physicians.

Trustworthy Provider based communities

The last (but not least) aggregation factor depends on the community provider's trustworthyness. Many physicians prefer to join communities related to scientific societies they belong to or trusted professional websites that they already consider relevant or reliable information sources. This explains the proliferation of physician communities within professional websites such as BMJ (doc2doc community) or related to medical association websites, such as CardioSource from the American College of Cardiology.

Usually these kinds of communities have a significant number of subscribers, largely also due to their existing physician databases.

The physician community landscape is continuously changing, but there is a trend towards growth of smaller communities, which are able to aggregate and keep active specialist interest groups. The true benchmark for measuring the quality and health of a community in this fragmented scenario will be to measure its social life - in order to understand how active each member really is, communicating, playing and sharing information and knowledge to create collective intelligence.

Via Plus91, Lionel Reichardt / le Pharmageek
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Doing Health Care Better Will Involve Using Data Better

Doing Health Care Better Will Involve Using Data Better | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Huge changes are ahead in healthcare. From the Affordable Care Act to new service models to advances in health and fitness technology, the field is definitely in a growth and change mode.

One critical dynamic involves what is known as “big data.” Unlike the smaller bits and pieces of information healthcare providers have always amassed on patients and outcomes, big data has the potential to aggregate the kinds of information that can be truly informative for all stakeholders: consumers, physicians, healthcare companies, and businesses.

Big data, which comes from collecting, processing, and organizing information requires web scraping software and technical savvy. Variously known as “data extraction” or “screen scraping,” it’s the kind of technology firms like Mozenda have been perfecting.

Mozenda and other data miners are basically transforming billions of bits into broad knowledge — or, as Mozenda CEO Brett Haskins describes it: “turning a mountain of data into moments of clarity.”

Many industries have already tapped into the wealth of information found in big data, but healthcare is just getting started. The potential gains in using big data are enormous — from access to the kind of patient case files that can define the healthcare needs of regions or demographic groups to statistics on which health or fitness apps are proving efficacious around the country.

Knowing more about what is really happening — and what is actually working — could create a whole new healthcare world.

The benefits of big data are becoming more obvious every day to the healthcare industry. Information, properly obtained, sorted, and analyzed with the latest extraction technologies, is the foundation upon which the future of healthcare will be built.

In a nutshell, doing health care better will involve using data better.

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Mhealth trends: More behavioral health apps but few for disabling chronic conditions

Mhealth trends: More behavioral health apps but few for disabling chronic conditions | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
An IMS Health report on consumer facing mobile health apps offers an outlook on the future of mobile health technology and has a breakdown of mhealth apps.

Via eMedToday
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5 Medical Technologies to Watch in 2015: Mobile Medical Apps | MDDI Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry News Products and Suppliers


More than five years ago, Apple sold consumers on mobile applications by telling them no matter what they want to do, “there’s an app for that.” The same couldn’t be said for healthcare providers and patients.

Last July, there were more than 1.5 billion apps in the iTunes and Google Play stores combined. Less than 2% of them—fewer than 28,000—were classified as medical, according to the publication iMedicalApps.

But thanks to FDA’s risk-based regulatory framework, announced in September 2013, and predictions that the market for mobile medical apps could grow to 26-billion users by 2017, more companies are starting to try their hand at mobile medical apps.

“2014 was the year of the app,” says Steve Wilcox, founder of Philadelphia design firm Design Science.

Consumer tech giants Apple, Google, and Microsoft grabbed headlines with platforms that enable more health and fitness app development, while several traditional medical device companies launched notable apps as well. One is Dexcom’s Follow, which is used in conjunction with a docking cradle to enable diabetics to share data from their continuous glucose monitors.

AliveCor also got FDA clearance for an algorithm to detect atrial fibrillation using its ECG smartphone attachment and app.
As developers become more familiar with FDA regulation, expect to see mobile medical apps jump from simply cool to clinically useful.

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Medical Business Infographics

Medical Business Infographics | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
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Don’t expect Apple Watch to monitor sleep

Don’t expect Apple Watch to monitor sleep | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
Battery life limitations will prevent Apple Watch from monitoring sleep. The post Don’t expect Apple Watch to monitor sleep appeared first on iMedicalApps.
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Study validates app for use in assessment of shoulder motion

Study validates app for use in assessment of shoulder motion | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
A simple mobile app could replace the traditional orthopaedic goniometer. The post Study validates app for use in assessment of shoulder motion appeared first on iMedicalApps.
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Novartis’ mobile health strategy poised to move from tracking to virtual care

Novartis’ mobile health strategy poised to move from tracking to virtual care | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |
While Novartis’ recent partnership with Google and its longtime relationship with Proteus have indicated that the pharma company has an interest in digital health, a page on the company’s website, added this summer, lays out its broad vision and explicit interest in mobile health specifically. The company even has a mobile health strategy lead, Michele Angelaccio, who holds the title of Associate Director US Mobile Health Strategy at Novartis Pharmaceuticals.

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TWearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT

TWearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT | Mobile Health: How Mobile Phones Support Health Care |

Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) may give the impression that it’s all about the sensors, hardware, communication middleware, network and data but the real value (and company valuation) is in insights. In this article, we explore artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that are becoming indispensable tools for insights, views on AI, and a practical playbook on how to make AI part of your organization’s core, defensible strategy.

First Definitions

Before we proceed, let’s first define the terms. Otherwise, we risk commingling marketing terms like “Big Data” and not addressing the actual fields.

Artificial Intelligence: The field of artificial intelligence is the study and design of intelligent agents able to perform tasks that require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making. In order to pass the Turing test, intelligence must be able to reason, represent knowledge, plan, learn, communicate in natural language and integrate all these skills towards a common goal.

Machine Learning: The subfield of machine learning grew out of the effort of building artificial intelligence. Under the “learning” trait of AI, machine learning is the subfield that learns and adapts automatically through experience. It focuses on prediction, based on known properties learned from the training data. The origin of machine learning can be traced back to the development of neural network model and later to the decision tree method. Supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms are used to predict the outcome based on the data.

Data Mining: The field of data mining grew out of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), where data mining represents the analysis step of the KDD process. Data mining focuses on the discovery of previously unknown properties in the data. It originated from research on efficient algorithm for mining association rules in large databases, which then spurred other research on discovering patterns and more efficient mining algorithms. Machine learning and data mining overlap in many ways. Data mining uses many machine learning methods, but often with a slightly different goal in mind. The difference between machine learning and data mining is that in machine learning, performance is usually evaluated with respect to the ability to reproduce known knowledge while in KDD the key task is the discovery of previously unknown knowledge. Unlike machine learning, in KDD, supervised methods cannot be used due to the unavailability of training data.

Fear of AI

Though perhaps not explicitly stated, you will find that some at your work hold sci-fi views of AI that could hamper proactive exploration of AI and machine learning within your organization. AI, for some, bring images of HAL 9000 from A Space Odyssey or more recent films such as Her and The Machine. 

Many futurists have speculated about the future of artificial intelligence that could rival or exceed human intelligence. One of those futurists is Ray Kurzweil, a recipient of the prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation honor.

In The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil elaborates on the singularity hypothesis. Kurzweil predicts that accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing or even ending civilization in an event called the singularity. During this period, he predicts “human life will be irreversibly transformed” and humans will transcend the “limitations of our biological bodies and brain”.

Kurzweil claims that machines will pass the Turing AI test by 2029, and that around 2045, “the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won’t be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating”. He further claims that humans will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component. Kurzweil envisions nanobots inside our bodies that fight against infections and cancer, replace organs, and improve memory and cognitive abilities. Eventually our bodies will contain so much augmentation that we will be able to alter our “physical manifestation at will”.

The artificial general intelligence (AGI) or strong AI community, though varying widely in timeframe to reach singularity, are in consensus that it’s plausible, with most mainstream AI researchers doubting that progress will be rapid.

In regards to feasibility, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen believes that such intelligence is unlikely in this century because it would require “unforeseeable and fundamentally unpredictable breakthroughs” and a “scientifically deep understanding of cognition”. Roboticist Alan Winfield claims the gap between modern computing and human-level artificial intelligence is “as wide as the gulf as that between current space flight and practical faster than light space flight”. Neuroscientist David J. Linden writes that, “Kurzweil is conflating biological data collection with biological insight”. He feels that data collection might be growing exponentially, but insight is increasing only linearly.

AGI raises difficult ethical questions and risks to civilization and humans. Political scientist Charles T. Rubin believes that AI can be neither designed nor guaranteed to be benevolent. He argues that “any sufficiently advanced benevolence may be indistinguishable from malevolence.” Humans should not assume machines or robots would treat us favorably, because there is no reason to believe that they would be sympathetic to our system of morality, which has evolved along with our particular biology. Hyper-intelligent AI may not necessarily decide to support the continued existence of mankind, and would be extremely difficult to stop.

Stephen Hawking believes that AI has a lot of promising things to offer for future, but not without possible dire consequences. He says that “success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,” and “unfortunately, it might also be the last”. 

Even Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, tweeted recently that “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes. Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.”

What’s Reality: Strong AI vs. Weak AI

Before running for the hills, let’s pause for a reality check. It’s important that we don’t confuse AGI with subcomponents AI applications.

AGI or strong AI is defined as the intelligence of a machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. For practical wearables and IoT implementations, we are working with weak AI, which studies a specific problem solving or reasoning tasks and does not attempt to simulate the full range of human cognitive abilities. There are AI applications that exhibit capabilities such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making, but none at human levels. The chasm from stitching subsystems, bottom-up to fully intelligent machines is galaxies wide.

Practical Applications of AI and Machine Learning

From Apple’s Siri, Google Voice Search, Google Brain, Google Translate, Xbox, Netflix, IBM’s Watson, autonomous cars, email spam filtering to credit card fraud detection, AI has already infiltrated into nearly aspect of our daily lives… and our dependence on it is only growing. 

So how can AI and machine learning be applied to wearables and the Internet of Things? Let’s walk through a few examples.

Medical Diagnosis and Treatment: Lumiata

Lumiata’s machine graph is based on multi-dimensional probability distribution that contains 160 million data points from textbooks, journal articles, and public data sets to replicate and scale doctor’s knowledge for use by nurses to diagnose and treat illnesses. Add patient-specific data, effects of time and location to Lumiata’s massive data set, the machine learning system is able to generate a clinical model of a patient. In the future, clinically approved wearables can interface with Lumiata’s API to provide a constant feed of a patient’s physiological data, time and place for proactive monitoring and event triggers.

Preventive Health: Google X Nanoparticles

Google X recently announced that they are researching the use of nanoparticles. Released into the bloodstream via a swallowed pill, nanoparticles can proactively detect and diagnose diseases, cancers, impending heart attacks or strokes based on changes to the person’s biochemistry, at the molecular and cellular level. The patient can then use a wearable wristband to view readings of the nanoparticles. Google aims to use nanoparticles to clump around a cancerous cell or identify fatty plaques in the lining of blood vessels about to break free, potentially causing a heart attack or stroke.

Machine learning can be applied to learn to diagnose diseases and changes in biochemistry in the bloodstream through the movement of nanoparticles, as unattached nanoparticles would move differently in a magnetic field from those clumped around, for instance, a cancer cell. 

Preventive Health: Entopsis

Another early molecular diagnosis startup is Entopsis, a medical diagnosis platform that can screen for medical conditions using nano-engineering and machine learning. Entopsis is able to detect patterns and biomarkers that point to specific conditions by analyzing the protein composition of biofluids. 

After incubating a biofluid sample using their Nanoscale Unbiased TExtured Capture (NUTeC) process to capture molecules, Entopsis applies its signature analysis based on machine learning algorithms to analyze the molecular signature on a NUTeC glass. The scanned signatures are then uploaded to the cloud to run signature comparison against others in the database to find similar profiles.

Entopsis desires to give consumers direct access to NUTeC dishes to collect biofluids and send it in for molecular analysis. Could NUTeC glasses be equipped with IoT sensors to optically scan and transmit signature data to the cloud remotely?

Body Movements: Atlas Wearables

Atlas Wearables is a fitness band plus intelligence platform, powered by the Motion Genome Project database of movements. Aside from measuring heart rate and calculating the calories burned, Atlas’ claim to fame is their machine learning algorithms that automatically classifies your exercise routine in 3D vector, being able to decipher the difference between push-ups and triangle pushups. Exercise detection is just the beginning. In speaking with co-founder Peter Li, the startup’s aspiration is to bring “intelligence into body language and movements”. Machine learning algorithms and datasets can be extended to understand how you are walking, sitting, moving or interacting with others, that can give clues about your mood, physical reaction, energy level and even context. 

Emotion Measurement: BrandEmotions

BrandEmotions solves the problem of quantifying consumers’ emotions. Sentiment analysis and surveys provide positive/ negative or stacked ranked results but brands still can’t classify nor measure the emotions of their consumers. BrandEmotions enables brands to measure how consumers feel about their brand experience, from retail, live events, movies, hotels, cruises, amusement parks to advertising. BrandEmotions, a product of Amyx+McKinsey, visualizes the emotional reaction of participants to brand engagement, allowing brands to optimize the brand experience, increase brand loyalty and accurately target products and services at the right time. BrandEmotions’s emotion sensing, machine learning platform measures physiological data captured through a broad range of wearable devices and Internet of Things connected devices to translate data into emotional classifications and intensity using its proprietary EmotionIQ methodology. 

Medication Compliance: Vitality

Vitality, acquired by NANTHEALTH, addresses the billion dollar medication adherence market with an Internet-connected pill cap called the GlowCap that blinks and sounds when it’s time to take medication. Vitality’s compliance-enhancing system tries to change patient behavior through a combination of feedback, reminders, education, and incentives to improve patient’s medication adherence. The GlowCap provides real-time data to caregivers, such as when medication has been removed or a dose skipped. Patients can reorder by simply pushing a button on the cap. 

Speaking on a panel at the Wearables + Things 2014 conference, Dr. Yan Chow, the former Medical Director of Kaiser Permanente’s IT Innovation group, stated that drug compliance is a complex, multi-layered issue. “It’s not simply that patients forget to take their medication. Some patients disregard advice from doctors and family members for irrational reasons,” asserts Dr. Chow. Blinking pill bottles may not be enough. IoT startups need to understand at a deeper level how to overcome stubborn resistance to drug compliance, whether that’s through reminders, education, gamification, or something else. 


The third year of record drought in the farmland of the San Joaquin Valley in California is forcing growers to rely almost entirely on well water and farmers are worried that groundwater will run out. California produces more than 90 percent of the broccoli grown in the United States and just about every other fruits and vegetables. No other state can match California’s output per acre. Hence, the drought condition in California affects national agricultural output and commodity prices that we personally feel at the grocery store. So how can IoT and machine learning help?

The ENORASIS project uses a network of sensors in the fields to determine how much water to give their crops through subsurface drip and micro-irrigation systems. The sensors collect environmental and soil conditions such as soil humidity, temperature, sunshine, wind speed, rainfall and the water valves to quantify water already added to the fields. ENORASIS combines weather forecast and sensor data about the farm’s crops to create a detailed daily irrigation plan that best suits the needs of each crop. The model also includes crop yield data and energy and water costs, helping farmers decide whether extra irrigation will increase yields profitably or cause a loss.

Another project is the SCRI-MINDS project, a research collective comprised of scholars from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, Colorado State University, Cornell University and the University of Georgia that applies wireless sensor networks and environmental modeling to conserve irrigation water for nurseries and greenhouses. 

Over time, researchers can amass a rich dataset of geographic-specific irrigation, weather, environment, soil, and crop yield data by plant and tree varieties that machine learning algorithms can use to determine the best crops to plant for the next farming cycle.  

Robotics: Petronics

Petronics recently launched and funded Mousr on Kickstarter, the first robotic mouse that can see and react to a cat’s movements, bringing to life the Tom & Jerry chase for your cats. Equipped with a 360 degree camera, motion sensing technologies, and Bluetooth, Mousr responds to motion and external forces to escape a cat’s paw. According to co-founder David Jun, next on their product roadmap is “to develop AI algorithms that will help Mousr to outsmart a cat every time”. Petronics introduces robotics into the home in an affordable, gamified way that opens the door for other startups to pursue robotic AI dogs and eventually child-sized AI robots with machine learning-based movements and natural language process capabilities. This is validated by JIBO, the world’s first family robot, pioneered by a social robotics MIT professor. 

Other noteable AI-based home robotics include Anki Drive and WowWee. Anki Drive combines virtual car racing games with physical RC cars powered by artificial intelligence. WowWee’s MiP self-balancing robot with GestureSense technology not only responds to hand gestures but is aware of its surroundings.

AI and machine learning techniques are being actively applied in many areas:

Affective computing (Affectiva)Bioinformatics (Classifying biological sequences, clustering biological entities)Brain-machine interfaces (Emotiv)Brain neurons connections (EyeWire -crowdsourced)Cheminformatics (Thomson Reuters Systems Biology)Classifying DNA sequencesComputational advertising (Microsoft, Yahoo)Computational finance (Algorithmic trading, quantitative investing, high-frequency trading)Computer vision and object detection (Dropbox/ KBVT, Occipital, Google+ photo)Facial recognition (Emotient)Fraud detection (First Data, Fiserv)Game playing (The Last of Us, Halo, Sim City)Information retrieval & search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing)Inputted facts (IBM Watson)Optical character recognition (Google Docs)Machine perception (Computer vision, machine hearing, and machine touch)Market segmentation (IBM)Medical diagnosis (Entopsis, Google X nanoparticles)Natural language processing (Google Translate, IBM Watson — Fluid, MD Buyline, Welltok, Healthline, Elance)Protein prediction (Noble Research Lab)Recommender systems (Amazon, Netflix)Robot locomotion (Honda ASIMO)Sentiment analysis (Twitter, Google Prediction API, AlchemyAPI, BeyondVerbal)Speech and handwriting recognition (Google Translate)Text categorization (Gmail, Outlook)Playbook for Integrating AI As a Core Business Strategy

1. Get clarity on the business problem that you are trying to solve. As a senior executive, you shouldn’t be trying to figure out which AI or machine learning approach to apply but rather to determine what are the actionable insights that will make your offering defensible in the marketplace. For Google it meant better search results.

2. Familiarize yourself so that you can competently evangelize the value of AI within your organization. Remember, you’re not trying to become an AI expert but to have a reasonable understanding of AI and machine learning concepts. For an introductory overview, consider these resources:

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) by Stuart Russell and Peter NorvigMachine Learning by Thomas M. Mitchell

For a cliff note version, refer to AI co-founder John McCarthy’s article.

For more in-depth, search for specialized books that cover machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, computer vision, neuroscience, probabilistic reasoning/ programming, logic, bioinformatics, etc.

Another great resource is the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) non-profit scientific society.

3. Recognize challenges and limitations. As alluded in the beginning of the article, we are far from reaching strong AI. That means that business expectations have to recognize the limitations of AI applications.

In some cases automated learning systems need to be combined with hand-coded knowledge to produce better results. 

Depending on the subfield, some systems cannot reach a high degree of accuracy without human assistance, such as in the case of recognizing images. In those cases, a crowdsourcing approach like the Amazon Mechanical Turk, reCAPCHA, and EyeWire helps refine the model further through human input. 

A real challenge is data integration, integrating across different data sets. Google’s Alon Halevy notes that “no matter how much you speed up the computers or the way you put computers together, the real issues are at the data level.” The relationship between the different schemas must be understood before the data in all those tables can be integrated. Additionally, companies are shifting to using both SQL and NoSQL, structured or unstructured relational database, formats for data storage depending on the application.

4. Partner with AI research institutions. MIT (CSAIL), Stanford (SAIL), Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, University of Washington, to name just a few, are the world’s most renowned institutions for AI research. Leverage their expertise by partnering with them on your next AI project.

5. Hire the right talent. To do it right, your organization has to commit to building the right team. For instance, adding to Google’s already deep AI bench, Google hired futurist Ray Kurzweil in 2012 as the Director of Engineering to oversee Google’s most forward-leaning ideas.

Because the AI field is interdisciplinary that crosses computer science, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy and neuroscience, your resource matrix has to be multi-disciplinary. 

In some cases, it might make more sense to hire a consultancy with the expertise in AI rather than to build from ground up.

6. Start experimenting. Get your team to start experimenting with open source code and libraries on GitHub and other sources.

Actionable Intelligence

It’s easy to get caught up on the wearable and the Internet of Things sensors, hardware and communication protocols but the key differentiator to your solution will be the actionable intelligence that it derives from data.

Spend the time to seek the truth about AI and appropriate the fundamental knowledge. Equipped with a powerful arsenal, you will then be ready to craft a defensible business strategy. In turn, you have the potential to create a higher valuation firm that will lead the competitive pack. Start applying the scale and power of AI today. 

Scott Amyx is founder and CEO of the wearables digital agency Amyx+McKinsey.

Via Tictrac, Aequolab
Victor Jimenez's curator insight, December 7, 11:19 AM

Cyberpunk 2020: A role playing game (RPG), I enjoyed with friends in the early 1990’s, that explored the “what-ifs” related to a future world where technology was not just part of society, but was part of the human condition, part of the typical person’s body itself. What-if you could have a data chip in your head to apply memory and learn skills (think Neo from the matrix)? What if you could replace limbs and other body parts with machine parts that fit seamlessly with your own body and functioned better, faster, stronger? Then, the fun part of the game, what-if body implants (or replacements) were so commonplace that most everyone had one (or multiple)? How would society be different? How would life be different? How would the valuation on life or “human-ness” be different?


These are the typical science fiction fan musings and which led me to my fascination with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The possibilities of what-if are being applied here and talked about endlessly in the social spaces of today’s creative technology labs, universities, and of course online.


What-if, we get so good at making “smart” technologies that one day the pace of change and learning that the inventions can perform outpaces our own? You do not have to look far for good discussion on this topic. If, like me, you want more on the subject, I suggest your first stop to be referencing Ray Kurzweil. For a good list of publications by Mr. Kurzweil checkout:


Wired Magazine’s article, Wearing Your Intelligence: How to Apply Artificial Intelligence in Wearables and IoT by Scott Amyx provides many ideas to start a creative mind thinking on the future of AI. Check it out for a solid foundation of terms, contrasting opinions by thought leaders, and applications of AI for our future. If you are like me, you will enjoy the read and perhaps also the reminder of the reasons why you became interested in science fiction in the first place.