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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...

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Crowdsourcing rare diseases for patients - Crowdmed

I recently discovered two crowdsourcing sites for medicine after starting to wonder how it would work in an ehealth type of application. Strangely, they both have a similiar name and function if I am not mistaken, medcrowd.com and crowdmed.com.  I am going to talk a little about Crowdmed as it looks more interesting.


To my mind, this is a very powerful crowdsourcing site to fetch opinions on rare medical conditions without an IBM Dr. Watson nearby. Is is a trusted source of information? I wouldn't know, but I like the way the site works, according to this article in the new scientist:
Anyone can join CrowdMed and analyse cases, regardless of their background or training. Participants are given points that they can then use to bet on the correct diagnosis from lists of suggestions. This creates a prediction market, with diagnoses falling and rising in value based on their popularity, like stocks in a stock market. Algorithms then calculate the probability that each diagnosis will be correct.
Here is the welcome email from the founder and CEO Jared Heyman:

Here’s a quick refresher on how CrowdMed works:
  1. Patients complete a questionnaire, which collects information regarding their symptoms, medical history, family history, basic demographics, medications, and lifestyle.
  2. Once a case is submitted, CrowdMed invites hundreds of Medical Detectives (“MDs”) to recommend potential diagnoses and bet on the ones they think are most likely.
  3. CrowdMed’s patented prediction market technology harnesses ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and provides patients with a short list of the most likely diagnostic suggestions to discuss with their doctor.
I started CrowdMed because I watched my younger sister, Carly, suffer through three years of debilitating symptoms, visits to two dozen doctors and specialists, and over $100,000 in medical bills before she was finally diagnosed with a rare but treatable illness. She was CrowdMed’s first test case, and our phenomenal community of Medical Detectives collaborated to accurately solve her case in just a few days, proving that large crowds working to solve a problem are often smarter than even the most expert individual. I want to share CrowdMed with other patients so they don’t have the same experience Carly had. Read more about CrowdMed’s story.
To get started, log in to CrowdMed and choose ‘Solve a case’ or ‘Submit a case’. And don’t forget -- for every 1,000 points you win solving cases on CrowdMed, you can donate $1.00 to the patient of your choice on Watsi and potentially help save two lives at once.
We love to help bring patients one step closer to the right diagnosis and treatment, so please visit CrowdMed today!
Together, we can help save lives.
Jared Heyman
Founder, CrowdMed 

The eHealth Dimension of Elysium

I saw Elysium last night and wish to comment on my impressions. The movie was hilarious in some unexpected ways. The first was when power went out in the Cineplex theatre. Was this a local brownout or was the entire East coast of North America now in the dark. Sitting in a pitch black movie theatre with strangers all around makes you wonder. The usher announces a 5 minute power outage but not to leave our sits. Most of us are riveted in our seats anyway on a far distance world of the imagination on the screen. Lesson for ehealth - always have a backup power source for your data.  Movies these days are run on digital. There is no film "rewind". The usher asks us how far we have to back up before the movie stopped. The movie resumes. Ten minutes later the sound disappears but the movie still continues.

The audience is hilarious. Someone says he will be Matt Damon, and someone else the bad guy Kruger, who starts talking with the exact same accent. The movie stops, the usher enters again, and asks us when they should stop backing it up. Someone in the audience says when can we get a refund for this bullshit. It seems to be a general consensus. The film is ruined for many. Eventually the film starts up and it wasn't too far to the last scene. Leaving the theatre we all get courtesy tickets for a free film. Lesson for ehealth: engage your audience (users) with feedback.

No spoilers here - see the movie - it is chock-a-block with ehealth wonders.






ehealth enabled Word Cloud with NVivo

I have tried experimenting with NVivo on some research data we collected from an online survey. Using the website for this blog I created a PDF and imported it into NVivo, ran a query, and created this Word Cloud for the site. This isn't for the entire site, but I think it is an intriguing picture of the weather patterns the data is sending forth.

I went back to the drawing board and make a Word Cloud for as much as the website I could get into Adobe Acrobat before it "ran out of memory" - about 1300 pages. The word count frequencies on the top 40 words was much much higher but the cloud still looks about the same as I will post it here. By the way, there are much better uses for NVivo, but this is the most fun so far:

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Perception ethics and machine brain interfaces

Melanie Swan, aka, "La Blogga", has a great article/video on her blog which was also listed on the Institute for Ethics of Emerging Technology website entitled "Killer Apps of Cognitive Nanorobotics". The title alone is enough to suggest what is out there these days and what is someday possible, and thus having a remote semblance to ehealth and the purpose of my blog. She made the video in French and Spanish as well. The YouTube talk is called the "Introduction to Ethics of Perception in Nanocognition".  There is a longer, and I think much greater, version < here >.

The YouTube video is kind of fun because if you don't want to try and listen to the lecture in the different languages, you can also click the Icon for Transcript on the youtube dashboard (beside Statistics and Reports) and see a line number machine translation output of it, which is almost accurate. I say almost because the machine algorithms pick up "epic" instead of "ethic" frequently. It also transcribed "Azimovs Robotic Laws" as "Mom's Law of Robotics" (in the shorter Introduction video).

I liked the references to philosopher Henri Bergson who's ideas about creativity I have always valued. "Machine Ethics Interfaces"? In the realm of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), the nanorobotic and perception technology is a little advanced or science fiction-like. You need to get some background in nanomedicine or reading Ray Kuzweil's articles about how nanorobotics injected into the brain will be able to alter perception, if not entirely create alternative virtual realities. On the other hand, current BCI (Emotiv, Personal Neuro, Muse, etc.) might be able to augment a kind of ethical space. My 2 bit intellectual comments on the article and the video lecture would be a waste of your time (and probably a challenge to your wit) so I recommend going to the source.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

eHealth and the sci-fi movie Elysium




The science fiction movie Elysium has some interesting ehealth and healthcare applications. For example, there is the Med pod 3000.
Looking at the timeline for Elysium we see the following milestones (as they relate to healthcare):



2024: Armadyne first company to develop AI that eclipses power of human brain.
2052: MedPod 1000 debuts.
2093: MedPod 2000 finds cure for cancer.
2154: MedPod 3000 cures last known human disease.

Friday, August 2, 2013

ehealthenabled.ca new blog on Word Press!

Hello

I have imported this blogger site into a new experimental IP address I have named ehealthenabled.ca but am using the site only for some software implementation experiments. I will continue to blog from there while I compare, Word Press, which is awfully good, to blogger.