They monitor hearts, count calories … but are health apps any good for you? | Technology. Going to the doctor’s is a pain. Why, if you have a recurring condition, do you need to take time off to go through the same checks to get the same prescription? How is it that the only time the doctor can see you is the least convenient hour of the week? Why is it that after wasting time with old copies of National Geographic in the waiting room, you are ushered into a smaller room only to wait again? Now technology – bold disrupter of industries from media to banking – is promising a brave new world of medicine. A world in which, as author and cardiologist Dr Eric Topol has it in his new book, The Patient Will See You Now. Tech companies see healthcare as a new gold mine. Stolen healthcare information is worth 10 times as much as stolen credit card information.
So far the apps available and health trackers such as Fitbit and Jawbone are fairly primitive devices that count steps and measure exercise and calories. Do health apps work? If I can just opt out, why does it matter? Walgreens shares digital adoption data, announces UnitedHealthcare partnership. Since Walgreens merged with UK drugstore chain Boots last year, the company has been ramping up its digital strategy and has announced a slew of strategic partnerships with companies like Qualcomm Life, WebMD, MDLive, and PatientsLikeMe. Walgreens President and Walgreens Boots Alliance EVP Alex Gourlay, who transitioned over from Boots in the merger, spoke at HIMSS this week in Chicago about each of those deals and some of the larger strategy behind them.
Gourlay laid out a three-point strategy for Walgreens: becoming patient-led, promoting innovation, and good partnerships. “We truly believe that patient-led and consumer-led is not important just today, but in the future,” Gourlay said. “And we start and finish everything with the insights we have on our patients and consumers. We know as a brand and believe as a brand that innovation is critical, especially shared, joint innovation that really makes a difference in people’s lives.
Quantified Planet | Bringing together data on people and the planet for the benefit of humanity. The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self (Plus, a List of the Best Personal Data Tools Out There) This post was originally posted on Technori. See the original article here. A transformation is happening. People, like you, are taking control of something conventional wisdom has told us is not ours to understand: our health.
Why are we fat? What makes us feel sluggish? What causes our disease? This is the Quantified Self. This is not new. The only difference today is the technology. Self-trackers are pushing the limits of personal health. As self-trackers are pushing the movement forward, entrepreneurs are helping it scale. Where there are trends, there are opportunities. Crowdfunding sites are often a good indicator of market trends, and quantified self tools are among the most successful. Are you becoming happier over time? Are your mind and body performing better? Are your days more productive than they were a year ago?
Unfortunately, happiness, performance, productivity, and other variables in our lives are complex, confusing, and chaotic processes. What about your startup? Activity.
New devices. Regulation. Alberto Frigo. Tech to take the stress out of stress. Image copyright Thinkstock Mairin Philips (not her real name) suffered from anxiety, so much so that it made the pain from a stomach ulcer far worse. Then a friend suggested a handheld anti-anxiety device. "I was keen to give it a try, but was not convinced it would be of benefit to me," she says. The biosensor device, called Pip, is gripped between the thumb and forefinger, looks a bit like a small iPod, and measures sweat and electrodermal activity associated with stress levels. People working to manage their anxiety can then play a number of games like Relax & Race, where relaxing confers a competitive advantage. "After a couple of days," says Miss Philips, "I had stopped taking relaxing medication, which I had been relying on due to anxiety.
"This was a surprise to me. Pip is among a batch of new stress-management gadgets. The device, which connects by Bluetooth with smart devices, was originally researched and patented in 2007, but the company did not survive Ireland's downturn.
"Hacking" Chris Dancy has seen the future of work, and it looks bleak. Photo: David Agee Tesco — the company that runs a chain of grocery stores across Great Britain — uses digital armbands to track the performance of its warehouse staff. A former Tesco employee told The Independent newspaper that the armbands provide a score of 100 if a task is completed within a given time frame, but a score of 200 if it’s completed twice that fast.
“The guys who made the scores were sweating buckets and throwing stuff around the place,” he told the paper. Tesco representatives said the devices allow users to switch into a “break mode” for up to 25 minutes a day. ‘If you can measure it, someone will, and that somebody should be you.’ — Chris Dancy That’s just one of the many ways that employers are using technology to track employee productivity. Dancy is connected to at least three sensors all day, every day. And he thinks every white collar worker will need to adopt a similar regimen soon. The Workplace Apocalypse. Dear life hacker.
Forbes. Diabetes. The hyper-individual_BBC. 17 January 2013Last updated at 19:20 ET By Richard Nicholls The Future Foundation Pushing your buttons: Is technology putting power back into the hands of consumers? I have long been interested in consumer empowerment - the idea that the balance of power has been slowly shifting from companies to consumers.
Technology has of course been a huge driver, as tools emerge that allow consumers to see their electricity expenditure, compare prices, track their health and home energy use - and make the best decisions (or even automate the decision making process) based on this information. We've been tracking a number of trends that have charted the rise and rise of consumer empowerment, more on those later, but we've recently begun to see evidence of the emergence of a new breed of consumer - the hyper-individual. This is not just the consumer who gets the best from their money and time, or the multi-tasker searching for a good deal. To the max So let's look at the genesis of this trend. Track it down. Code of conduct phone use - BBC.
Transform your relationship with your phone with these rules, and prepare to enjoy life’s greater pleasures. How often do you check your phone when you’re out and about? I’ve been reflecting on this question while writing in a rented cottage in Scotland, without internet access or phone signal. I counted the number of times my hand twitches towards my pocket, where a smartphone usually nestles. The tally was at least once an hour.
These frequent little checks of personal devices are known among human-computer interface researchers as “micro-interactions” – rapid glances at email, social media and apps, often lasting only a few seconds. If it’s disconcerting that checking my smartphone has become a habit, there’s a particular irony for me: for the last few months, I’ve been involved in a project to design a “code of conduct” for smartphone usage on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. Talk now, text later Or tweet later. So, break the routine – and make your habits visible once again. The New Curated Self. Class Notes Print Photo by Flickr user shino 誌野 By Paula Marantz Cohen One of my students described how her friends now insist on having their pictures taken before they do anything.
She explains: “If we go to a restaurant or to a concert, they first have to pose at the table or in front of the theater and have photos taken on their cell phones for subsequent posting on their Facebook pages. They have to be sure that their hair is right and that they are standing in a properly cool position.” She then demonstrated the favored posture—hand on hip, three-quarter turn. I recall a version of this from my childhood, when my father used to take his camera with him on our vacations and insist on recording our every move.
What my student described is an exaggerated example of this sort of detached relationship to living. Is this a bad thing? The pressure of so much self-curating may also account for the excessive drinking that is standard practice among young people these days. The Curated Self. The word ‘curator’ derives from the Latin curare meaning ‘take care’, and is commonly used in the context of cultural institutions; galleries, museums etc. Over the course of the last year or so the term was increasingly used in conjunction with digital marketing, particularly social media-based campaigns. For fast-paced, content-driven comms planning, agencies would talk of acting as the ‘curator’ for the brand. In other words, deciding what content, stories, reactions, conversations and touchpoints to release at precisely the right time. Now I think it can apply to the very nature of one’s digital identity itself.
With people constantly adding to, tinkering with, amending, reinventing and fragmenting the components that constitute their identity in digital terms (think everything from individual tweets to Instagram photos), they themselves are becoming curators of how their ‘virtual self’ appears to the world. It’s almost as if there are two selves: the real one and the curated one.
Academic lit. Mood-tracking app paves way for pocket therapy. (Phys.org) —An Android app which keeps tabs on users' mood swings and works out what might be causing them has been developed by researchers, with implications for psychological therapy and improving well-being. A smartphone app that tracks people's feelings and works out what might be triggering peaks in their mood, using the data invisibly captured by their phones, has been developed by researchers. The free app, called "Emotion Sense" has just been launched and is available for Android. It takes advantage of the fact that smartphones are increasingly capable of collecting information about where we are, how noisy our environment is, how much we are moving around, and who we communicate with. Unlike other, similar, research projects, Emotion Sense then combines systematically-gathered data from a wide range of sensors with the user's own report about their mood, which is entered through a system designed by psychologists.
Emotion Sense is also a live research project. Joerg - Beautiful Data. The most common words in the Tweets tagged #qseu13 posted over the weekend. Here you find another visualization: [Wordcloud] Last weekend the 4th Conference on Quantified Self took place in Amsterdam. Quantified Self is a movement or direction of thought that summarizes many aspects of datarization of the live of people by themselves. The term “QS” was coined by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, who hosted the conference.
Thus it cannot be denied that some roots of QS lie in the Bay-Area techno-optimistic libertarianism best represented by Wired. “For Quantified Self, ‘big data’ is more ‘near data’, data that surrounds us.”Gary Wolf Quantified Self can be viewed as taking action to reclaim the collection of personal data, not because of privacy but because of curiosity. Tweets per hour during the conference weekend. What self is there to be quantified? What is the “me”? On est obligé d’ailleurs de confesser que la Perception et ce qui en dépend, est inexplicable par des raisons mécaniques.G.
Tracking the Quantified Self. Self-tracking is not really a tool of optimization but of discovery, and if tracking regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becoming normal, one of the most interesting effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “normal” means. —Gary Wolf, cofounder, The Quantified Self (The New York Times, 28 April 2010) For better or for worse, we are data-generating machines. Whenever we pay with a credit card or drive through an automated toll system, or answer an e-mail or make a phone call, we can’t help but leave a steady stream of ones and zeroes in our wake.
This is our digital exhaust: the trackable or storable actions, choices, and preferences that we generate as we go about our daily lives. Even when just browsing the Web, we leave behind personal clickprints that uniquely identify our surfing behavior and lengthen the paperless trails that document our electronic selves. But isn’t all this TMI (too much information)—narcissism for gadget freaks and data geeks? Gadgets 'giving us the lowdown on our health' 11 August 2013Last updated at 19:42 ET By Olly Bootle Horizon The man who freezes his own faeces - Prof Larry Smarr (right) Is it informative or worrying to know in detail what's happening in our bodies?
Dr Kevin Fong investigates how information is moving from doctor to patient - and what that means for the management of our health. There is a famous scene in the movie The Matrix where Keanu Reeves' character, Neo, is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The former would open his eyes to the painful truth about the world he lives in, the latter would allow him to remain blissfully ignorant.
We are almost at a stage where we can all make such a choice. In recent years, consumer technology has become so advanced, so small, and so cheap, that we can now use apps and gadgets to do things we used only to be able to do in hospitals with the help of a doctor. In a few years, there are projected to be 170 million wireless health gadgets in use around the world. Toys for the boys? What’s Driving the Quantified Self Movement? | Our Mechanical Brain. I’m an organizer of the current Quantified Self meetup group in Berlin. I attended the global QS conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.
And when people ask me what it’s all about, I still have trouble giving them a clear answer. Judging from the group’s website, I’m not alone. Our slogan is “self knowledge through numbers,” and the About page calls us “an international collaboration of users and makers of self-tracking tools.” For example, stepping onto a scale, taking a written test, running a timed race, getting your DNA sequenced – all these things will give you “self knowledge through numbers,” even if you never repeat or track them. In a sense, I suppose every human activity is “quantifiable” with timestamps and map coordinates and subjective rating scales, and similarly you could argue that anything you quantify even once is being “tracked,” but in both cases that seems like a stretch.
Maybe it’s the “self” part, as subject rather than object? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Like this: Talk Details. BBC on Parkinson's. Scientists at Birkbeck will be working with software company uMotif and the Cure Parkinson’s Trust to develop a smartphone app to help people with Parkinson’s Disease to track their symptoms and general well-being; give them medication reminders; and provide cognitive testing games. The project, funded by the Department of Health, aims to reduce the personal, social and economic costs incurred when patients deviate from their prescribed treatment regime.
Dr Jon Stamford, from the Cure Parkinson’s Trust said: “Non-compliance with medicine regimes can have negative impacts for patients, their families and the wider NHS. Finding ways to keep people on track with their medication, as well as keeping a record of their symptoms plays a very useful role in managing the condition.” Dr Addyman said: “Birkbeck are working with uMotif to create an app that will actually be useful to patients. Good design and clever technology are only half the story.
Partner contact details. Announcing the uMotif Parkinson’s Tracker | Sara | Not patient but im-patient. Quantifying Myself. » The Quantified Self Movement is not a K... The Beginner’s Guide to Quantified Self (Plus, a List of the Best Personal Data Tools Out There) Wired's Wolf & Kelly Talk the Quantified Self. The Wearable, Implantable, Personalized Future of Medicine. Open source medicine.
Visualizing Our Quantified SelfQuantified Self. Self tracking goes meta: Apps to track your app use. Quantified Self Meetup Groups - Aachen - Meetup. Wearable Tech Is Plugging Into Health Insurance. About Measured Me | Measured Me. The Me in Quantified Self | patrik malmberg. Apps hospitals use. Shaq. Privacy and security regulation-mobihealth.