Cape Town Piloting Canadian Technology
I recently commented on a friend’s very interesting photo. It showed a group of doctors around a patient’s bed all holding iPad Mini’s while they digitally document their decisions. The photo caption mentioned how truly amazing this whole experience was for her. My friend is an Intern doctor at one of the most well...
Design In Medicine
If you have read the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson then you might remember one scene he describes vividly. Jobs, on his deathbed, breathing heavily and sedated, noticed the bad design surrounding him in the hospital environment. Jobs ripped it off [the oxygen mask] and mumbled that he hated the design and refused...
How Can Google Glass Transform Medicine?: An Interview with Accenture Connected Health Services
Accenture’s recent Digital Consumer Tech Survey 2014 revealed a growing interest in wearable technology. That’s endorsed by the plethora of new wearable devices on show at this year’s CES. Typical are smart watches and also wearable smart glasses – the pioneer here, of course, being Google Glass. Glasses are particularly interesting to us here at...
Mindfulness and Communication; Wearable Technology and Data Visualization
Vandrico is an unbiased 3rd party verifier and specialized R&D firm that investigates new technology to help businesses identify the true players on the map. It recently released a database composed of over 118 wearable devices. The site is interactive, enabling researchers to see how many devices have been designed for the chest versus the...
Injecting Design into Global Challenges
The World Design Impact Prize takes place every year to recognize industrial designs focused on building solutions to improve quality of life. Among the 2013 finalists was the ABC Syringe, a syringe built to reduce spread of disease caused by contaminated needles. Issues Injections are one of the most common health care procedures in the...
How a Talking Pet Can Keep Us Healthy
This entry is part 12 of 14 in the series Wellthcare Our first example of Wellthcare leveraged the local postal service to create new, health-related value. It was able to do so because the people involved knew their postal worker – they were part of the local community.Our second example – GeriJoy – uses the...
Transparent Medical Records And The P+P Relationship
In the New England Journal Of Medicine last week, an article about increasing transparency in medical records caught my attention. It was a good idea. And a frightening one. At this era of EHR use, patients are generally excluded from the documentation process. We prefer to request documents directly from other providers or institutions and...
MedCrunch At DLD 2014 – The Conference Of Intersections
Just a quick announcement that we’ll be reporting from this years DLD Conference. A rather unique event in Munich, organized by german media mogul Hubert Burda. It’s hard to describe what this event is all about, but apart from a bunch of Internet celebrities, authors and thinkers, it’s really a blend of Digital-Life-Design. It’s similar to TED....
Interview with Steve Byrne of Final Roadmap
I had the pleasure of connecting with Steve Byrne of Final Roadmap after my last article “End of Life Decision Making, Online” was posted two weeks ago. Below, he speaks on behalf of all three founders about Final Roadmap, its catalyst for creation, and how end of life decision making has changed over the past...
How Seemingly Absurd Fiction Can Radically Change Healthcare
Albert Einstein once said: ‘if at first the idea is not absurd, then there will be no hope for it’. How is this related to healthcare innovation? You may wonder. I assume some of you still remember Star Trek. In the series a “medical tricorder” is used to scan patients, effectively displaying what is wrong...
Curing Hearts and Lungs Remotely
The frustrations of delivering medical care are many: unequal access, limited resources, excessive costs, non-compliance, and legal documentation to name a few. Our systems based practice is being disrupted through large scale efforts on the policy side and simultaneous grassroots efforts by tech saavy patients who both create apps to track their own health and...
Owlet Baby Monitor: The Quantified Infant
Back in July I wrote about the Scanadu Scout, a vital sign monitor that raised over $1.6M USD on Indiegogo and is set to ship in March, 2014. The Scout was developed by Walter de Brouwer after his son was hospitalized and he and his wife found themselves struggling to understand masses of information–but its...
