John Halamka posted this video on his blog about the Wearable Intelligence software using Google Glass technology for healthcare (ER). It is awesome to see this from a Health Informatics perspective. They are experimenting with Google Glass in their ER. I like that he said:
"After several months of testing, we have deployed the product to clinical providers in the ED and are completing the first IRB approved study (to our knowledge) of the technology’s impact on clinical medicine."
The devices using the Wearable Intelligence software are medical devices and need to be tested clinical and cleared by the IRB. Evaluating the efficacy and patient safety over a longer term will also be interesting. I wonder how how they designed the clinical trial methodologically.
Google Glass: Surgeon Saves Lives with It, Bar Bans It
Livestream has released its first piece of Glass software, PC Magazine reports, which allows users to tap the headset and say, “Okay Glass, Livestream,” and then livestream the event to viewers. Meanwhile, The Verge reports on the multitude of facial recognition apps on the market today, including “NameTag,” which links a user’s face to “a single, unified online presence.” And The New York Times reports on both the opportunities and the challenges inherent in Google Glass, with some welcoming the technology enthusiastically—such as one lung surgeon who recently used Glass to help perform a procedure—and others banning it entirely, such as one California nightclub. Full Story
There are several versions of the Korean TV Drama Heo Jun, or Hur Jun (2013 version & 1999 version ) about the greatest physician in Korean history, the accredited author/editor of the Donguibogam (literally Mirror of Eastern Learning) (동의보감, 東醫寶鑑), Vol. 1-25. Not much is known about his life, and the TV dramas are largely fictional, but the legacy of the Donguibogam continues to live on after 400 years. The wood block movable type volumes have been reprinted 40 times in China where it is highly revered as the major classic of medicine, and more than several times in Japan. The original first two prints are still preserved in as good as new condition in several libraries in Seoul. The UNESCO report on it, which comes close to the announcement of the first good English translation of the 25 volumes, attest to it being the first state sponsored public health text and policy. This is unprecedented in public health and only makes me think of the time John Snow removed the pump handle on the cholrea ridden water in London in 19th century.
The remedies and cures promoted by Heo Jun in the Donguibogam are household common knowledge, and I can attest to being treated and restored by several during my years I lived in Korea. Almost any folk remedy, herbal medicine, acupuncture is attributed to him and the Donguibogam. Korea has two medical systems, the traditional and the modern. Today's naturopathic doctors would be more like this form of traditional medicine, which is very popular in Korea.
In this modern world of digital health, I look forward to one day trying to read the translations in English, though I totally lack knowledge of the medical systems it contains. I have looked through one of the online original text volumes just to see if it did have Hangul (Korean phonetic writing) and not just Han Mun (Chinese), because most of the Koreans at the time could not read Han Mun, only the upper class literati. I did see some Hangul, but it is largely in Chinese. I can only watch in amazement at the TV Korean dramas, which come with English subtitles (which are not always professional grade, but mostly acceptable by the way), and which continue to pass on this knowledge at the same time as it raises Heo Joon to the level of a saint. This is from the UNESCO nomination for "Memory of the World":
Bogam is the first-ever comprehensive book on medical principles and practice edited and distributed nationwide, according to the innovative order by state to proclaim the ideals of public health by the state and preventive medicine.
Bill Gates chairs the board of directors for this new company:
http://www.terrapower.com/
It can burn all the depleted uranium at one waste site in Kentucky to power all the homes in the US for 700 years:
http://terrapower.com/pages/environment
I think they combine supercomputers with the wave vector energy grid to maximize energy production. No special relevance for eHealth, save for the "e". And that is why it is "awesome".
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.
Scientific information on medicine is essential but sometimes no information is the best information - the kind of consciousness that is only concerned about awareness of breathing.
As of today, Commander Hadfield is still in quarantine waiting for the Soyuz blast to take him to the International Space Station, where he will stay almost half a year. I am going to try and follow his twitter account. He had an interesting post today pointing to a medical article that talks about how life in space is not good for life extension - it can be compared to the most sedentary sofa bound earth lifestyle! I would like to learn more about telehealth precautions they might have planned.
NASA / Getty ImagesNASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, STS-132 mission specialist, participates in the mission's first session of extravehicular activity (EVA) as construction and maintenance continue on the International Space Station.
It seems astronauts hovering in weightless environments and earthlings reclining in front of the TV share a surprising trait: both avoid the effects of gravity — and both age rapidly as a result.
Now a unique joint venture between Canada’s health-research and space agencies is investigating the parallels between space flight and terrestrial aging, hoping to find ways to prevent the ill effects of each.
Astronauts and inactive older people suffer similar bone loss, muscle atrophy, blood-vessel changes and even fainting spells, say scientists, and their respective conditions can provide lessons for both domains.
Space flight is the ultimate in sedentary lifestyle
“To me, there really are a lot of overlaps,” said Richard Hughson, a University of Waterloo expert on vascular aging and brain health. “Space flight is the ultimate in sedentary lifestyle. When you’re up in space, you’re floating around, when you want to move a heavy object, you just give it a little push and away it goes.”
Billed as the first formal collaboration of its kind in the world, the project of the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research hosted a workshop for domestics scientists, doctors and business people in Ottawa earlier this year, and plans a broader international conference in 2013.
Typically in top physical shape, astronauts would seem on the surface to have little in common with seniors, especially those with particularly inactive lifestyles. Yet development of human bodies depends greatly on mechanical forces at play when people walk, lift things and otherwise move the weight of their own bodies or other objects against the ubiquitous pull of gravity.
This book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler professes the exponential timelines of Ray Kurzweil and the remarkable inventions, technologies, philanthropists, and the BoP (bottom of pyramid) rising billions of people.
Looking for eHealth content is not that hard. Diamandis started the X Prize foundation and there is a competition for a mobile medical device that will diagnose a patient faster and with more accuracy than a human, based on the inspiration of the Star Trek Tricorder, which I blogged about before. We almost have IBM's Dr. Watson doing alot of that (on the cloud for everybody), but not with the X-rays, ultrasound, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc.
I have heard a lot of these stories before in the news - the internet pommels us everyday with these stories, but still some of them remain most startling and inspirational. Take for example "Lab on a Chip":
"Harvard professor George M. Whitesides, a leader in this emerging field explains: 'We now have drugs to treat many diseases, from AIDS and malaria to tuberculosis. What we desperately need is accurate, low-cost, easy-to-use, point-of-care diagnostics designed specifically for the sixty percent of the developing world that lives beyond the reach of urban hospitals and medical infrastructures. This is what Lab-on-a-Chip technology can deliver.'
Because LOC technology will likely be part of a wireless device, the data it collects for diagnostic purposes can be uploaded to a cloud and anlayzed for deeper patterns. 'For the first time,' says Dr. Anita Goel, a professor at MIT who company Nanobiosym is working hard to commercialize LOC technology, 'we'll have the ability to provide real-time, worldwide disease information that can be uploaded to the cloud and used for detecting and combating the early phase of pandemics'.
There is a whole chapter on Healthcare. I didn't know Diamandis also had an MD. Another great story is zero-cost diagnostics, and the discovery by Carlos Camara that Scotch tape can be used for X-Rays - the Tribogenics X-Ray Pixel. There was a great story about in Nature.
There are other stories/inventions/visions in the book that caught my attention:
"The impacts of mobile telephony on health stretch from being able to quickly locate the nearest doctor to a smart phone app invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London, that turns an iPhone into a stethoscope, and has since been downloaded by over 3 million doctors. And it is only one of 6,000 health care apps now available through Apple."
If you want a glimpse of the future, subscribing to IEET is probably the best way to go, though I think many writers tend to be overly optimistic. This article on Quantum Computing and the future of health in 20 years might be one such, but who knows. I didn't know that a Canadian company D-Wave, developed the first QC machine. Their website has an interesting article on how QC programming is different from regular programming, which reminds me a little about Bell's theorum.
Quick: without grabbing your cell phone, tablet or PC, when did Earth population reach 7 billion? In the near future, the answer might be immediately whispered into your ear, “October 31, 2011.”
Any query you can think of will soon be answered with a headband that gathers data from the Internet and feeds it directly into your brain, say Peter Schwartz and Rita Koselka in this Fortune Magazine article.
Stuart Wolf, Nanostar director at University of Virginia predicts an even more Earth-shaking change. Within 20 years, he says, instead of cell phone conversations, we will have “network-enabled telepathy;” communicating directly to another person’s headband, using just our thoughts.
Recognizing thoughts instead of ‘voice-speak’ may be confusing at first, experts say, but with training, “thought-talking” could one day become the preferred way for humans to communicate with each other.
How do quantum computers think? This 5 minute video explains. The world’s first QC, D-Wave One, was made and sold by D-Wave Systems to Lockheed Martin, to solve security issues. The 7-minute video below offers more details on this groundbreaking project:
QCs will accelerate advances in medical technologies. In a paper published recently in Nature Scientific Reports, Harvardresearcher Alan Aspuru-Guzik presented results of the largest protein folding problem solved to date using a quantum computer. QCs will accelerate advances in many areas of life sciences, including drug and vaccine design, Aspuru-Guzik says. The following scenario imagines what life could be like in tomorrow’s quantum computer future:
“It’s the year 2030, and as I glance around my bedroom, I feel secure knowing that microscopic sensors embedded throughout the house constantly monitor my breathing, heart rate, brain activity and other vital health issues. For example, blood extracted last night by the bathroom sink checked for free-radicals and precancerous cells, and then ordered all the necessary preventative drugs from the home nano-replicator.
As I step into the shower, wall tiles display the day’s top headlines: ‘Mars mission launches ahead of schedule;’ ‘Military drones destroy another terrorist training camp using ‘smart dust;’ and ‘today is the 20th anniversary of the first quantum computer.’
Glancing in the mirror, I find it hard to believe that I will celebrate my 100th birthday later this year. Having recently opted for total body rejuvenation, my reflection displays the image of a healthy twenty-something, with wrinkle-free skin, perfect sight, original hair color, strong muscles and bones; and an enhanced brain that, although it took some getting used to, has greatly increased my intelligence.
Getting ready to fly to a conference, my auto-drive electric car rolls its top down on this warm day. I manually drive to the electronic roadway on-ramp, and then relinquish the wheel to the vehicle. Arriving at the airport, my ‘smart’ car drops me off at the terminal, and then returns home. An ‘intelligent cam’ scans my mind and gives an instant approval, no waiting for ticket-check or security.
While boarding the plane, I see a familiar face. My headband immediately flashes his identity data and displays it on my eyes. Dr. Jones, I call out. It’s so nice to see you again. How was the conference? Only a slight flicker of Jones’ eyes betrays that he is Googling my details too. Hi Dick; the conference was great; and congratulations on your Estonia presentation.”
Welcome to the future! Headbands, because they can access all of the information on the Internet, enables us to think of any issue; then immediately receive data pertinent to that issue in our eyes or ears.
In another application for the technology, the necessity to learn languages would disappear. This would allow more friendships to develop; and if the devices were cheap enough, which experts claim will be a certainty with nano-replicators expected in this future time, headbands would be affordable for everyone.
These techno-wonders hold great promise to improve relationships. No more forgetting names and details, plus increased intimacy generated by thought-talking could bring people around the world closer together, creating a Global Village; a society acting as one voice to advance peace. Comments welcome.
Dick Pelletier is a weekly columnist who writes about future science and technologies for numerous publications. He's also appeared on various TV shows, and he blogs at Positive Futurist.
There are some pieces of music Oliver Sacks refers to, in his book musicophilia as "ear worms" - it plays over and over again in the mind. One such recent piece had me thinking about where I had heard it before as it appears in unlikely places, CBC radio often, and once during a National Geographic documentary about finding ancient Bon writings in caves in Mustang Nepal. I searched to try to find the piece, knowing only that it was African, slow, and invoked a very sad feeling and landscape. Finally, it occurred to me it might have been in the soundtrack for the Constant Gardener, and indeed it was. The composer, Ayub Ogada, is also from Kenya, so perhaps the music invokes those same landscapes seen in the movie?
This is one of the most unbelievable and amazing documentaries I have ever found on youtube - a BBC documentary. I was reading Heinrich Harrer's "Seven Years In Tibet" where I learned his team was the first to climb this notoriously dangerous and deadly Swiss mountain from the impossible north face. I strongly recommend following it to the end in order to learn about the teams and individuals who found their way to the top. Very inspirational.
