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Hacking Health in Hamilton Ontario - Let's hear that pitch!

What compelled me to register for a weekend Health Hackathon? Anyway, I could soon be up to my ears in it. A pubmed search on Health Hack...

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Your smartphone will see you now - McLeans article on Tricorder

I have been looking for stories or updates on the Tricorder Xprize and have found a few updates here and there, but this one on the March issue of McLeans magazine just caught my attention. How could I, a member of the public, have missed it? I like the McLeans online version "View in Clean Reading Mode". Is that a hat tip to the smartphone too? Probably. Time to get one myself maybe. Anyway, no belly aching about that. And that reminds me about a conversation I had with a refugee from Ethiopia that other day. He is interested in starting "literacy" programs in Ethiopia/Eritrea. I asked him if it was true that everyone in Africa has a cellphone. He said yes it was true that everyone had a cellphone, but not bread. This article is one of those "must reads" for anyone who actually reads this blog.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/2/
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/3/

IEEE conference in Toronto: Theme - SmartWorld

If I find the pocket change for registration - I am there in a heartbeat. Two panelists or speakers  of interest to eHealth students are Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and Dr. Alex Jadad, who is founder for the Centre for Globale eHealth Innovation lab at the University of Toronto. Having Ray Kuzweil, Steve Mann, Marvin Minsky, et al there is just "icing on the cake".

Website for IEEE ISTAS'13: http://veillance.me

Theme - "Smartworld"

Living in a Smart World - People as Sensors
ISTAS'13 presenters  and panellists will address the implications of living in smartworlds - smart grids, smart infrastructure, smart homes, smart cars, smart fridges, and with the advent of body-worn sensors like cameras, smart people.
The environment around us is becoming "smarter". Soon there will be a camera in nearly every streetlight enabling better occupancy sensing, while many appliances and everyday products such as automatic flush toilets, and faucets are starting to use more sophisticated camera-based computer-vision technologies.  Meanwhile, what happens when people increasingly wear these same sensors?  
A smart world where people wear sensors such as cameras, physiological sensors (e.g. monitoring temperature, physiological characteristics), location data loggers, tokens, and other wearable and embeddable systems presents many direct benefits, especially for personal applications. However, these same "Wearable Computing" technologies and applications have the potential to become mechanisms of control by smart infrastructure monitoring those individuals that wear these sensors.
There are great socio-ethical implications that will stem from these technologies and fresh regulatory and legislative approaches are required to deal with this new environment.
This event promises to be the beginning of outcomes related to:
  1. Consumer awareness
  2. Usability
  3. A defined industry cluster of new innovators
  4. Regulatory demands for a variety of jurisdictions
  5. User-centric engineering development ideas
  6. Augmented Reality design
  7. Creative computing
  8. Mobile learning applications
  9. Wearables as an assistive technology
"Smart people" interacting with smart infrastructure means that intelligence is driving decisions. In essence, technology becomes society.
Professor Mann University of Toronto will be speaking in the opening keynote panel with acclaimed Professor of MIT Media Arts and Sciences, Marvin Minsky who wrote the groundbreaking book The Society of Mind  and has helped define the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among his major contributions.
General Chair of ISTAS13 and formerly a member of the MIT Media Lab under the guidance of Nicholas Negroponte in the 1990s Mann is long considered to be the Father of Wearable Computing and AR in this young field.


Saturday, June 1, 2013

Bioethics and eHealth - for example - Telecare, Surveillance, and the Welfare State

Key stakeholders in the project management of an eHealth project include, clinicians, nurses, software engineers, Senior Management, Project Manager, statistician, healthcare administration, etc. But often I think a key player that should be added more to the list is a Bioethicist.  This article from the American Journal of Bioethics - Telecare, Surveillance and the Welfare State - is  illustrative about why a bioethicists on the team may be essential. Unless you have some sort of institutional access you might not be able to read the whole article. In this article, the Bioethicists argue the pros and cons of surveillance technology for the elderly who are being monitored in their homes for their chronic health conditions. The authors come out in favour of the surveillance technology - it is not Big Brother - but it all depends on how a chronic a condition a senior might have. Anyway, I value the point of view(s) of bioethicists because they tend to see healthcare differently from front line workers and administrators.

Here is the abstract:

 2012;12(9):36-44. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2012.699137.

Telecare, surveillance, and the welfare state.

Source

University of Birmingham, UK. t.sorell@bham.ac.uk

Abstract

In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a "Big Brother," and the same kind of electronic tags that alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is "wandering" are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a "surveillance state." In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence.