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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...

Showing posts with label Conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conference. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Coursera, Health Hacking, Diagnosis Apps, and Interoperability

There has been a lot happening and this is just briefly some of the things I have been tracking. A lot of my time is being spent taking a Coursera online course taught by Dr. Peter Singer (the Australian, not the U. of T. Ethicist) called "Practical Ethics". It is a 12 week course and there are about 25,000 people taking this MOOC. There are writing assignments, peer evaluations of such, video lessons, guest lecturers, discussion forums, essential background readings - I am very impressed and at the same time, very busy just trying to hang on.

COACH recently had a webinar on Health Hacking, facilitated by some of the founders of this fascinating organization. I would strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in healthcare technology and informatics, take a serious look at their website, and / or attend one of their hackathons. It is becoming so popular the next eHealth conference will have a Hackathon. During the webinar they mention how even the Canadian Medical Association thought highly of the concept. I was trying to find the article the CMA wrote about it but could only find this one:

We all know what happened to Google Health, and I am not sure today where Microsoft Healthvault is these days, so I am skeptical about any buzz we might hear about Apple Healthbook.

The Kuzweil Accelerating Intelligence news reported on a new Do It Yourself Medical Diagnosis App.  I have not had time to look into the details of this, but it might be a software candidate for an integrated Tricorder project.

The last item is really a gem, and it is the keynote talk given at HIMISS interoperability showcase, by Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm uses 3 examples in the evolution of technology to make comparison to how new standards in interoperability can transform healthcare technology: shipping containers, Israeli military technology example called the Bekaa Valley Turkey Shoot, mp3 players.




Monday, September 30, 2013

Future Med Conference at Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego


The future med conference this year is at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. The Core Track of the conference is very eHealth relevant:


  • Introduction to Exponentials on the topics of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D Printing, and IT Data Driven Health 
  • Future of Oncology 
  • Personalized Medicine 
  • Mobile Health & Body Computing 
  • Design Thinking and Tech Integration (i.e. Google Glass in Healthcare) 
  • Future of Intervention 
  • NeuroMedTech 
  • Regenerative Medicine 
  • Future of Pharma & Clinical Trials
  •  Global Health Impact of Technology on the Practice of Medicine 

I had heard that San Diego is a great place for conferences, but what I think is the real star of this conference is the Hotel! The Del Coronado is made of wood - over a hundred years old - and it's on the beach!

Now, this conference is going to set you back $4500 as an ordinary registrant for the four days. The last time I went to a 4 day conference happened to be in Boston. Paid by my institution, it was over $1000. It had stellar presentations and I will never forget the keynote presentation by Dr. Judah Folkman who talked about how the Institutional Review Board at his university (Harvard), instead of doing it's usual rubber stamp bureaucratic handling of a research protocol, made recommendations to the scientist that actually lead to the permanent end of a terminal illness that affected kids. I digress. What I mean is, unless you are paying the VIP price of over $8000 dollars, you might get a valuable experience without feeling like you've been robbed at this conference.

And that VIP experience made me think of a TV program I was watching the other day - more and more digression but this has an eHealth element - CPAC channel actually, which is a dedicated Canadian politics channel, that featured a live broadcast from the United Nations on Maternal Health. On the same panel with our Prime Minister Stephen Harper was Melinda Gates. Melinda spoke about how she personally observed how simple cell phone and text messaging used by women in Kenya/Tanzania was leading to all kinds of health improvements. Exactly! It is Communications Technology that is needed, as well as the vaccines and the mosquito nets. There is your eHealth element.

But what this made me also think about - and there is no eHealth dimension to this really (except maybe the Science fiction movie Elysium again - is the book I am reading "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Eveyrone Else" by Chrystia Freeland. Maybe I thought, the Future Med conference is one of those Davos / TED / Gilded Age kind of meeting places on the Global circuit. Perhaps not, but digression will now cease.


Thursday, June 6, 2013

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.


Thursday, April 4, 2013

Health Coach - York University Program

I was at an National Institute for Health Informatics (NIHI) conference at York University when I heard about York's Health Coach program. From my relatively short time studying and being involved with Health Informatics, I really think this program will have relevance in the future. Here is part of the description I thought most interesting:

"York's commitment to health coaching is related to the increasing capacity of 21st century technologies to eliminate the need for office consultation. Many tests that are presently implemented or planned during medical office consultations will be planned by phone and undertaken at home as primary care and specialist physicians increasingly use remote monitoring to precisely assess patient status. As this trend develops, patients and caregivers will become increasingly motivated to improve behavioural effects on health. The health coach will be the first line of contact in stimulating and supporting health-behaviour change, acting in alignment with treating physicians. This improves the scope of services being delivered and lowers delivery costs by leveraging cost effective people."

It does sound to me in-line with Dr. Eric Topols' "creative deconstruction of medicine", but I haven't read the book yet, and have no idea if he mentions this type of role. Dr. Topol will be a keynote speaker at the eHealth conference in Ottawa this spring. Certainly, from the research I have seen on personal health records, there is room and a need for Health Coaches.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

ePosters at eHealth 2012 Vancouver

I was just looking through some of the ePosters from the eHealth 2012 conference in Vancouver.  I am glad I didn't go because I was accepted for an ePoster and I don't think mine (on Personal Health Records) would look as good as some of these.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

White Coat Black Art eHealth

I saw Dr. Brian Goldman give a keynote address at eHealth 2011 in Toronto.  I missed getting a signed copy of his book - The Night Shift - but I took it out of the library later that week and enjoyed reading it.  His CBC radio program - White Coat Black Art -  is excellent.  I remember him saying at the conference that his pet peeve about ehealth technologies was too many usernames and passwords.  After all, he is an ER doctor, where every second counts, so having to remember dozens of usernames and passwords under time pressure, would be frustrating.  I don't know a solution off hand to that.  I know there is Open ID, but from my limited experience with hospital IT systems, and their privacy and security requirements, I can't see them using that.  There does have to be more privacy by design put into systems, for security reasons, but designers also need to think about patient safety - and I would argue that usernames and passwords is possibly an encumbrance to that in the ER.  

Monday, March 12, 2012

The Direct Project

Part of the talk I will give at the Advances in Health Informatics Conference at York University next month will refer to the work of the Direct Project. I heard about this from reading John Halamka's Geekdoctor blog post. I thought it was a very exciting prospect for pushing health information to the personal health record. Before I give my talk, I have to become more reacquainted with it, but it looks like most news on it is coming form a twitter stream. My talk will look at the system architecture of "tethered" personal health records, and so, here is an architectural picture of Direct Project. It is a proposed Health URL - once again - the idea seems to be to be a major advance to securely transport health information. I have as yet seen any sign of pilot projects underway in Canada, but I would be most interested in seeing one started.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

John Halamka - Keynote at eHealth Vancouver 2012

Just learned that John Halamka, (Geek Doctor blog) will be Keynote speaker at Vancouver eHealth 2012. http://www.e-healthconference.com/keynote.html Might get a chance to meet him if I go there. Might go to York University for the Advances in Health Informatics conference instead to present same paper (where I reference a lot of the work of John Halamka on Personal Health Records) http://www.ahic.nihi.ca/