WEARABLES - INSIDABLES - IOT - CONNECTED DEVICES - QUANTIFIEDSELF

Wearable technology to monitor the time you spend being sedentary could encourage changes in behavior that helps improve health, research reveals. Sedentary behavior monitoring is under-represented in the wearable tech market, a new study has found.

Report reveals a tectonic shift in the medical devices industry, with new technology players poised to take significant market share from traditional medical device manufacturers in the non-invasive monitoring arena.

Consumers want technology to monitor every aspect of their life and Wearable Tech, IoT and all emerging technologies are working together towards such goal. The question remains: Will this help or hurt providers’ efforts?

Hace algún tiempo en A un clic anunciamos que se recetarían apps de salud y después hemos constatado que ya hay doctores que lo hacen . En el App Date Health que se celebró anteayer en Espacio Fundación Telefónica, José Fr

Wearables are anything but sensible, from first hand observation they are somewhat silly, as they are trying to solve a problem that can be solved by a myriad of simpler and more passive mechanism.

If you were at CES, you could not have missed a new category of computing called "wearables." This category of devices can be described as the FitBit gone mad. Wearables currently come in three main categories: health trackers, watches and glasses. In each of these categories some if not all devices are pivoting to solving the world's biggest health problems.

Almost daily, I see a new wearable device launched, and while they all are minimally viable products, they continually get sillier and sillier. We are seeing everything from wearable necklaces (like necklaces were never wearable) earrings, shoes, clothing and many other bodily accruements being outfitted with small computers/biosensors, low voltage needs and high connectivity. Like clockwork, every new device no matter how silly, calls out to the world with press releases, tweets, YouTube videos and multiple pounds of the manufacturing firm's proverbial digital chest reckoning how disruptive some new wearable product is.

My observation is that we have bastardized the word disruption. Most wearables are disturbing mankind under the once well-intended charter of disruption.

While a minority of humans continue to wear these devices past the first few months of purchase, most folks (like myself) stop wearing after the nostalgia has worn off. I gave up my FitBit after about six months, my pebble watch in about six days and my Google GLASS, well I got over that bad boy in about six hours. I got over them the same way I got over my first CASIO watch, which doubled as a calculator in high school; said watch plus calculator was disturbing my life. Disruption does not have to disturb.

Good disruption is change without disturbance.

The hypothesis is simple, wearing something on my body that is not confortable, fashionable and delivering more value than it disturbs me is not a sustainable value proposition. So the big question is what will become of wearables? Clearly the movement of computing to the edge of the network will continue, and the connecting of things/biosensors that are not computers (Internet of Things) will continue. Wearables currently position themselves as trying to solve health's biggest problems. [..]

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Ayant constaté un écart important entre la couverture médiatique du sujet, l’engouement des utilisateurs, les enjeux pour les marques et les études sérieuses disponibles sur le marché frança

While wearables primarily are buckled to consumers' wrists at this point, they'll soon find a new home: the ear, says Craig Stires, associate vice president for big data, software and analytics at IDC Asia Pacific. And they might even get a new moniker: hearables.

The market for wearable sensors is increasing dramatically. Devices are being designed to help people manage chronic conditions, recover more quickly from injuries, analyze physical and environmental abnormalities that may lead to more serious health issues and detect unhealthy habits before they cause problems, according to Pathfinder Software. A new infographic from Pathfinder Software takes a look at the types of wearables available, how they are used, their wireless capability and other details on this technology. Thank you to Pathfinder Software for an educational Infographic. Also, thank you to the Healthcare Intelligence Network for having this Infographic on their site.

I heard the other day that by 2017, 50% of the pharmacy spend in the U.S. will be on specialty pharmacy.  It seems this is driven by two phenomena.  The first is the growing crop of new molecules that are in the class ‘biologics’ –  [..} These are classified as specialty pharmacy drugs.  The second phenomenon is that just about everything else will be generics. Specialty drugs in this one burgeoning expense class seem to be taking over the pharmaceutical industry, and bucking the trend in health care — to succeed by being more efficient.  This brings to mind two opportunities for connected health.  One is surrounding these expensive therapeutics with connected health applications in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs.  The second is that connected health interventions, because of their demonstrated improvements in adherence, can  improve the care experience, patient satisfaction and quality of life, and themselves prove to be therapeutic.

I am not going to speak to the first opportunity, but we are working on a real-life example of this at CCH now.  We are under non-disclosure with the research sponsor, but I promise you it will be an exciting result when we can publicly discuss it.

The latter opportunity is intriguing and a bit of a sleeper.  Traditionally, the introduction of new technologies into health care has been assumed by knee-jerk reaction to add costs.  Yet, we’ve accumulated evidence to the contrary. I have two stories to demonstrate this.
The first example is a clinical research program we have under way with adolescents who have asthma.  We’ve created a private Facebook group for them to be part of, and that’s about it really.  No fancy bells and whistles.  Just old-fashioned social networking.

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The second example is in type II diabetes, using connected health to improve activity.  We randomized patients with type II diabetes into two groups, one received an activity tracker and nothing more versus a second group that received a tracker plus were sent automated motivational messages every day.

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At Apple’s WWDC event, the company announced its rumored native health tracking platform, which we now know to be called HealthKit. Rumors have circulated that the tracking platform would be called HealthBook, though we noted previously that was probably not the official name.

“Developers have created a vast array of healthcare devices and accompanying applications, everything from monitoring your activity level, to your heart rate, to your weight, and chronic medical conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes.” Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said at the event. “But up until now the information gathered by those applications lives in silos. You can’t get a single comprehensive picture of your health situation. But now you can, with HealthKit. HealthKit provides a single place that applications can contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health.”

The platform HealthKit comes with a user-facing app simply called “Health”. 

“With Health, you can monitor all of the metrics you’re most interested and your activity, but not just that,” said Federighi. “You can use third-party applications. Now we carefully protect your privacy, so you have total control over which applications have access to your health information. But you can of course provide different activity, weight, heart rate information to the Nike app. And Nike’s working to integrate HealthKit, so they use that information to help you in your personalized fitness goals.” [...]

“We’re also working with the Mayo Clinic, innovators in healthcare,” he said. “And with their integration with HealthKit, they’re going to be able to — when a patient takes a blood pressure reading, HealthKit automatically notifies their app. And their app is automatically able to check whether that reading is in that patients’ personalized healthcare parameters threshold. And if not, it can contact the hospital proactively, notify a doctor, and that doctor can reach back to that patient, providing more timely care.”

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The Electronic Health Record Outcome: The Dream and the Reality

Electronic health records systems are far from delivering better healthcare. Design focused on better usability and patient outcomes can help.

The promised outcome of digitizing paper-based electronic health records (commonly and interchangeably referred to as EHR and EMR) was that it would make health care cheaper and more efficient. By making records digital we would be able to share them with different caregivers in a patient’s care network, creating a holistic approach to care and better outcomes. Studies concluded EHR adoption would lead to better preventative care and chronic disease management.

..In 2009, largely as a result of this kind of analysis and lobbying by EHR industry executives, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act appropriated $35 billion to incentivize and promote the use of health information technology by physicians, hospitals, and other health providers...Yet several years later, the projected benefits have failed to materialize. ...It begs examination of what has been the net benefit of this massive investment. What went wrong, could we have prevented it, and how can we fix it? ..We can easily summarize the root of the problem as a perfect example of the right intentions but the wrong incentives. In order to make sure the investment in EHR was spent wisely, the government came up with some pretty comprehensive standards called ‘meaningful use,’ (MU) criteria... The MU criteria were divided into three important milestones, in Stage 1, targeted at 2011-12, the outcome to be measured was “Data capture and sharing.” Stage 2, slated for 2014 measures outcomes from the perspective of “Advancing clinical processes.” Phase 3, set to start in 2016, finally aims to focus on “Improved outcomes” for patients. ..The first generation of EHR products are nothing more than form-filling interfaces to convoluted patient databases, recording what drugs, treatments and tests have been performed. ..
I am cautiously optimistic that Stage 2 and 3 MU criteria will drive the design of these systems back towards the originally stated clinical and patient outcomes. Every care must be taken to insure that every single feature of a new system is relentlessly focused towards the long-term outcome of the product (healthcare). Yet my concern is that those outcomes haven’t been front and center during the last few years of frenzied adoption. It will take several years to undo the impression amongst caregivers (and patients) that these systems are anything more than a tax to their productivity. ..

This first stage of development and adoption may still have a silver lining. Over 70% of healthcare organizations have adopted EHRs – and for many that technology adoption is irreversible. While the promise of EHRs for better healthcare on the personal level is still elusive, the value of the data collected is starting to bear fruit as more and more big data analytics applications emerge that help with pattern recognition and prevention. Yet, unless we focus on improving individual outcomes for patients, the clear winners will be the big companies whose profits are soaring across the records industry, rather than patients or the caregivers themselves.

The Design Imperatives: Re-shifting the Focus to Patient Outcomes, or, the Power of Thinking Ahead

Next year, hospitals and health organizations will initiate another wave of EHR upgrades that will make sure that they comply with the Stage 2 of the MU criteria. The temptation will be to focus on addressing the clinical advancement criteria, putting off patient outcomes until Stage 3 looms closer. However, a smarter and more forward-looking approach might be to aim for Stage 3 compatibility within Stage 2 implementation.

Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/01/elusive-promise-electronic-health-records/#ixzz2rVtlVF9z Read about the The Usability Problem ....At the heart of the usability and design problem is that an EHR system is trying to serve two different masters: the clinical staff or caregivers (users) and the administrators (buyers). The needs of these two constituencies are rarely aligned –caregivers look for ease of use and integration with their very specific workflow, administrators optimize for cost savings and easy billing. The result is a disruption of process and workflow that not only slow clinicians down, but introduces higher risk of human error, as medical professionals admitted to us in interviews. ..

Read about The Design Imperatives: EHR Evolution or Survival of the Most Usable ..In order to future-proof EHR investments, we must build systems with sufficient flexibility to assist in the process of gathering information from various sources at the point of care and beyond. The wearable technology space and the Internet of Things will have a dramatic impact on the quantity of patient data being recorded. In addition, as services built around the Quantified Self movement evolve and begin driving long-term healthy behavior change and helping with chronic condition management, we would need to design systems that empower providers to easily synthesize and mine the data for insights, and that allow for different kinds of doctor-patient interactions. Finally, we must also consider context of use, and focus on improving the patient-doctor relationship in the design, so that the technology supports better human communication – not more efficient human-computer interaction.

A Treatment Plan for EHRs: Outcomes + Usability

While focusing on patient outcomes and usability will each help EHRs deliver on their original promise, working on both simultaneously is the only way to realize that promise effectively and immediately. Focusing simply on usability without improving patient outcomes will make adoption faster, but in a way it will also help us get to the wrong destination faster. And with usability so poor, and doctors spending such a significant amount of their patient time taming the tool, it can be argued that positive healthcare outcomes without usability are impossible.

Read more: http://medcitynews.com/2014/01/elusive-promise-electronic-health-records/#ixzz2rVvrL33k

Après plusieurs auditions, la Commission de la sécurité sociale et de la santé publique du Conseil des Etats est entrée en matière, sans opposition, sur le projet de loi fédérale sur le dossier électronique du patient.

Consumers are not limiting themselves to a few multifunction devices, but instead have increased the number of digital devices. Wearable technology, digital trust and increased usage of apps are all trends that bear watching in 2014.

Digital Consumer Tech Survey 2014
The 2014 study is based on a survey fielded in the fall of 2013 of more than 6,000 consumers in six countries. Find out what consumers are interested in buying.

The e-Health Sensor Shield V2.0 allows Arduino and Raspberry Pi users to perform biometric and medical applications where body monitoring is needed by using 10 different sensors: pulse, oxygen in blood (SPO2), airflow (breathing), body temperature, electrocardiogram (ECG), glucometer, galvanic skin response (GSR - sweating), blood pressure (sphygmomanometer), patient position (accelerometer) and muscle/eletromyography sensor (EMG).

This information can be used to monitor in real time the state of a patient or to get sensitive data in order to be subsequently analysed for medical diagnosis. Biometric information gathered can be wirelessly sent using any of the 6 connectivity options available: Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS, Bluetooth, 802.15.4 and ZigBee depending on the application.

If real time image diagnosis is needed a camera can be attached to the 3G module in order to send photos and videos of the patient to a medical diagnosis center.

Data can be sent to the Cloud in order to perform permanent storage or visualized in real time by sending the data directly to a laptop or Smartphone. iPhone and Android applications have been designed in order to easily see the patient's information.

One Facebook designer/developer thinks he may have cracked the formula for creating personal analytics apps that are actually usable.

One in three Brits visit the doctor less often than normal thanks to health and fitness gadgets, a survey has found.

A third of people credited devices like pedometers and heart rate monitors with improving their health and decreasing their need to seek medical help.

The finding suggests modern technology could play a crucial role in easing the financial pressure on the NHS as the Government looks how to tackle the impact of an ageing population...