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Showing posts with label Singularity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Singularity. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

eHealth forever or technology forever?

I have been writing this "ehealth enabled browser" blog on eHealth since after I graduated with a M.Sc. in eHealth in 2012. I will probably be spending a lot less time blogging here. I still enjoy following the various topics and points of interest that I have encountered in digital health.  Recently one of the great health informatics bloggers, Dr. John Halamka - the Geek Doctor - has decided to wind down his blog. Looks like he is taking more to the twitter sphere. I highly recommend you check that out if you are interested in Health Informatics (or life in general).

A little while ago something I read inspired me to think about writing the ebook version of the "ehealth enabled browser" that I have run here on the earthspiritendless URL at blogspot.ca  Turns out I may have received more inspiration than the perspiration necessary to do that. For the time being, I will settle for writing this post. This will try to encapsulate what I think I have learned by following digital health during this blog experience. To start off  - let me try to explain the significance of the title of this post - eHealth forever or technology forever?

I saw a TED talk where I heard that essentially "technology lives forever" (Kevin Kelly - How Technology Evolves). To illustrate this point the presenter used the example of a steel plow, the kind our ancestors not so long ago pulled behind horses or oxen. A schematic or blueprint of this technology would allow anyone with the technology to replicate it - in essence, bringing it back to life. The technology will last many hundreds of years and would still exist in some less than functional form even after the warranty expires. When it is totally broken, you create another one. Maybe the most difficult thing is just preserving the knowledge and information to manufacture it.  Well, biological beings might appear to be in the same category - cloning DNA - but let's face it, we break down more permanently than the technology we have created. Which leads me to the URL name for this blog - earthspiritendless. The final word is going to be that none of this matters and that only the Earth abides. Nothing lasts forever.

I can't remember why I named this blog URL earthspiritendless when it was supposed to be about digital health and the study of health informatics. The title of the blog - "an ehealth enabled browser" - suggests a blog about someone "browsing" or reading about ehealth.  The URL name actually comes from the English translation for a Tibetan name a Tibetan Rinpoche (reincarnated Lama) gave me in Bodhgaya, India. It is not a riff on the sports wear company that makes earthspirit brand running shoes. I always did have some fear that the company would track me down and accuse me of infringing on their brand or something. The fact of the matter is that there is no connection between ehealth and the Tibetan "nom de religion".

Since eHealth has a computer science focus there is always going to be an attraction to future technologies - for as we know - technology evolves. If you want to try to follow where computer technology is going in the future, there would be no better futurologist to consult than Ray Kurzweil, currently Chief Engineer at Google. It was by reading his books and starting this blog that I began to see a convergence in the ideas of transhumanism, the singularity, and health informatics - a future where we need to learn how about the role of the health care system along with life extension concepts and technologies. I also read his weekly Accelerating Intelligence reports on new discoveries in science and technology, and have a link to it on the blog.

In the field of eHealth itself one of my overall impressions is the continual need for research and systematic reviews on the efficacy of eHealth for improving health and quality of life, as well as a return on investment. The latter just means an improvement in the quality of life. This is where the great service of such academic venues as the Journal of Medical Internet Research is focused. If I was to go back 7 years with a serious intent to study eHealth - toward a PhD for example - I would be busy reading, saving and studying journal articles. eHealth is a business, computer science, and health science interdisciplinary work, and it is always important to keep that in mind when reading and assessing journal articles.

I suppose if I was to generalize about what I have reviewed in digital health into categories of most interest to me and this blog, I could come up with something like this:
  1. Careers
  2. Ethics of Technology
  3. Life Extension
  4. Personal Health Records - Toward the Quantified Self
  5. Spiritual machines
Careers

A spiritual master was once asked what is man's greatest need and the answer was "having work to do". Sorry I don't have a reference for that or even if I have reworded that correctly, but it really means that we find no real meaning in life unless we do work.  Health Informatics as an educational program is an applied field where internships are developed, so it is career oriented from the beginning. One reason I studied it was the possibility of making a career change into what I perceived was an exciting field that had many new developments on the horizon. This blog was never going to provide me with an income from the google ads ( I made enough to buy a few cups of coffee so thanks for those clicks!). I once thought of extending it as a possible business and I secured an URL called ehealthenabled.ca with the intent of developing a site/service for ways of empowering people to use ehealth technology.

That ehealthenabled.ca site didn't run for longer than a year, and I used it mostly to explore again web development in the suite of web hosting software one finds in Control Panel. I learned that WordPress is better than blogspot for creating content. My problem was that I didn't really know what kind of content to bring to market. I had a vague sort of idea that what we need for public and preventative health were ehealth technology "garages" in every neighbourhood. When cars were mechanically breaking down all the time, every neighbourhood had a repair garage - all gone now as pumping stations have consolidated and cars no longer break down as frequently.  These self-service or consultant oriented ehealth stations would also have exercise equipment and all kinds of mobile ehealth technology available, including DIY ultrasound, tDCS etc - after working through the health, safety and privacy concerns of course. We know now how important exercise is for health and having access to resistance training equipment -and/or health coaches - is a fundamental health technology.

The other and perhaps most interesting aspect about an eHealth career is the current potential for entrepeneurship, start-ups, and innovation. eHealth is an applied field, an application of ideas and technologies to solve ever changing and challenging problems in healthcare. I have participated in several Health Hackathons and it would have been great to get involved in some of these types of activities a lot earlier. I would also like to turn the clock back a few more years so I wouldn't miss the mobile app programming bus! Knew that one was coming - did nothing much about it.

Ethics of Technology

Since I work professionally in an ethics related career ( university research ethics) I naturally have had an interest in technology and ethics. For many years I was more interested in bioethics generally and have some courses and conferences under my belt (including a conference presentation on RFID privacy and security concerns in Healthcare). In the past several years there has been a strong shift towards just focusing on the ethics of new technologies and I trace this back when Demi Hassabis sold his DeepMind artificial intelligence gaming software company to Google. Forming an ethics technology committee was a condition of the sale to Google. There is relevance to eHealth a lot here because at Google, Deep Mind went on to develop Alpha-Go the AI that defeated the best Go players in the world. Alpha-Go is also being used in Healthcare, much like IBM's Watson.

There is a really comprehensive research group that also has an open source journal called the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies -  https://ieet.org/. It is interesting to follow this group. I once tried to interest them in publishing an essay I wrote about Steve Mann but I ended up posting it on my Linkedin page - a version of it at least.

Life Extension

I think I only seriously became interested in how life extension related to eHealth by reading Ray Kurzweil. Medicine is more and more becoming an information science apparently. I think the corner was turned on that once medical reference libraries went digital. Living forever is a serious science fiction theme but if Ray is right and exponential changes is happening in computer power, discoveries in science are going to accelerate.  The idea that we should be trying to stay healthy to live longer is not new, but the idea that we should seriously try to stay healthy in order to possibly benefit by new life extension technologies that will be available after the singularity - in 2030? - certainly is a new deck of cards.  The movie Elysium, one of probably a thousand or so that explore life extension ideas in science fiction had a credible healthcare technology that could cure any disease.

Is this something I personally want and help strive to attain? Something like this is a foundational and massively transformational (thank you Peter Diamandis for that concept)  movement and revolution in healthcare where the ethics of maintaining quality of life is so vital. What if we as individuals don't have a choice for how long we are going to live if even the dictates of healthcare ethics say we have to be preserved in some form of silicon based artificial intelligence while our biological DNA is being reprogrammed for cellular regeneration. Maybe it will just come down to a duty to care?

Another spiritual master was asked what was the secret to his longevity and health and he replied "Living off the interest of my investments". Sorry - no reference for that anywhere on the Internet at the moment. Maybe I heard that before the internet.

Personal Health Records - Toward the Quantified Self

The ehealth enabled blog explored a lot studies about personal health records. An aspect tangential to that is a concept called the "quantified self". Will collecting a lot of health data in a "do it yourself" sort of way help save us? I found it interesting to read about experiences with fitbit heart rate data, facebook posts on personal health issues, and other such patient lead data collecting activities, that have resulted in some life saving measures.

The really protracted issues that never seem to go away are the problems with data interoperability. It is hard to join an HL7 committee and help advance the work of interoperability (tried that).  Not everyone is cut out to help write standards. New standards then emerge - FHIR for example. Now there is talk about how the blockchain will be used for the "provenance" of information. Who owns my health data, me, my doctor, or the data miners?

My own conclusion here is mostly about usability.  Collecting our own personal health data should be like an ongoing construction or renovation project where the tools are easily accessible.  Are we not building the virtual self? Log ins to health records are cumbersome - so is typing up the data. Just let the healthcare system do it? We have to be able to better track and record our ongoing health concerns - with or without the healthcare system. I also think we need artificial intelligence in the health record in our social media to tell us when to do things, based on our profiles and our precision medicine disposition. Out of nowhere, we should get a suggestion to get a shingles vaccination!

Spiritual Machines

Meditation to me is a form of health technology, and my teachers were like physicians who prescribed the daily practices for my own benefit, and the benefit of all sentient beings. Experimenting with the Muse EEG headband which is designed to induce or teach one how to enter a meditative state was a highlight not only of my blog posting, but of my own meditation experiences. Though I learned meditation in a long, hard, and traditional kind of way, I truly value the potential for technologies like the Muse. Talking AI or virtual doctors aside, exploring our own calm states of mind is going to make us better people in the long run. For then, we will know what we know, and what we don't know.


Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Humans TV Series Reviews on IEEG


I noticed two reviews on the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology on the new TV Series "Humans".

Spoiler alert in effect, but here is the review by Adrian Cull.
Here is the review by Nicole Sallak Anderson.

I have not seen the TV series but I think the ideas for this kind of science fiction were mined from the film directed by Steven Spielberg in 2001 called  "AI".

As one reviewer for the Humans TV series says, it is good that the public is starting to think about the ethics of this technology.



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.


Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Brain research projects - no more digital computers or programming!?


There are several huge "artificial brain" research projects going on now. There is one in Israel, United States (biggest NIH research grant in history), and the one in Europe is called the Blue Brain Project. One of the leading directors of the BBP is Henry Markham. I was listening to an interview with him in which he stated that within 10 years, once the virtual brain is created, it will mean computers will no longer need to be programmed - it would mean the end of the line for digital computers! These computers would not need to be programmed because they will have ability to learn by themselves. This really astonishes me. He further stated that the desktop computers in the future will be both digital and artificial brain.

The eHealth implications for the BBP are astronomical. At first the goal of such a virtual brain would be simulations to test drug reactions for Parkinsons or Alzheimers. Of course, those are more translational bioinformatic type of applications, but it would mean that every ordinary computer device would have access to a Dr. Watson type of medical intelligence.

In the spirit of this movement towards neuroscience integration of knowledge and huge research, I am reading Ray Kuzweil's new book "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed". Parts of the book are beyond my ken, especially the chapters describing how the brain grid is constructed and how it works, but I like reading Kurzweil because his theories of the evolution of computers is compelling. Not everyone appreciates the Kuzweil vision, and I found very humorous a review of Kuzweil by Don Tapscott in the Globe and Mail where he quotes a detractor of his writings:

He also has many detractors. Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, once said that Kurzweil's books are “a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad.”
I have to return "How to Create a Mind" to the library now, but I almost finished. Can't say I completely understand the "hidden Markov models". I also don't fully agree with Hofstader. Kurzweil even has quotes from Albus Dumdeldore and one of the Weasley clan, and I don't think that detracts from the scholarly work. Many times throughout reading the book I get the feeling that the book was written for both a human and a computer audience. Future "Hals" from 2001 a Space Odyssey are a target audience, and I think this book is a great contribution for computer understanding of human intelligence and how the brain works. br />


Sunday, February 3, 2013

Singularity University Future Med 2013 Autodesk Innovation Lab & Demos

I am just copying and pasting the whole page - endlessly interesting:


FutureMed has an Innovation Lab and Demonstration Room for participants and faculty speakers to use during the entire FutureMed program.

FutureMed 2013 Demos

Make rounds with the latest mobile telepresence robots from 9th Sense and AnyBots
Visualize realistic 3D anatomy with Anatomage’s amazingly interactive Virtual Dissection Table
Achieve better understanding of oral care behavior with BeamBrush, the world’s first app-connected toothbrush.
Experience the latest in high tech robotic surgery using the da Vinci Surgical System by Intuitive Surgical
Learn how Bespoke Innovations 3D Scanning Technology is changing the world of custom tailored prosthetics.
From Star Trek to Future Med, check out the new “tricorder” prototypes by MedSensation and Scanadu  – futuristic  devices that accurately measure body metrics and allow data to be transferred wirelessly.
Make DNA analysis and interpretation more accessible and less expensive by using the new DNA Guide Genome Browser for iPAD.
Turn your smartphone into a digital first aid kit with CellScope.
Learn how Ekso Bionics Exoskeletons can be used to augment human mobility and capability.
Check out Esteem, the world’s first and only fully implantable hearing restoration device that doesn’t rely on a microphone or speaker.
Take a look at GE Healthcare’s amazing Vscan, a pocket-sized visualization tool with ultrasound technology.
Check out the technology behind the Genome Compiler, the next generation of computer-aided design tools for synthetic biology.
Meet the folks at Health Tech Hatch, a company providing platforms for start-up fundraising, and usability feedback on healthcare concepts and prototypes.
Use Intellisenses innovative new technology to measure data, to video-document research, or to measure soft touch, pulse, and pressure metrics.Learn about the latest in Deep Infrared Thermography and its current use in the early diagnosis of breast cancer.
Try out “m3d”, an intuitive clinical and biomedical search engine, now being billed as the new “Google for Healthcare”
Monitor your fitness with Lark, Larklife, & Lark-Pro, three cutting edge wearable health and wellness tracking devices.
Be the first to view the next generation of Ultra-Thin Flexible Endoscopes created by Lightscan Technologies.
Sit up and take notice with LUMOback, the smart, wearable sensor and a mobile app that provides feedback on posture and movement.
Take a close look at CATRA, a low-cost, snap-on, mobile phone eyepiece that provides precise maps of cataracts in the eye. 
Make first response safer, more efficient, and cost-effective using the MEDIVIEW cloud-and-client platform
Use the BrainBot brainwave headset to literally read someone’s mind.Capture, compare, and share medical images for easy analysis using CaptureProof
Learn how CliniCast’s ARTO enables providers to improve outcomes and reduce costs through predictive analytics.
Manage your HR benefits more strategically using Benefitter Exchange 
Improve your health with Prevent  – an online program that uses digital tracking, personalized coaching, and social support to promote healthy behaviors.
Learn the many ways that Moxe Health aims to improve access to care for the underserved.
Learn how Neural ID’s Intelligent Waveform Service uses data pattern recognition to streamline and improve research.
Use OncoSec’s Medical Electroporation Device to specifically target cancer cells during chemo and immunotherapy
Size yourself up with Poikos, a smart-device technology that can quickly and accurately measure your body habitus. 
Think you have an idea that can change healthcare?  Meet the team of Rock Health, a business incubator company with a long, successful track record in nurturing Start-Up’s
Not sure that rash is serious?  Take a moment to consult Virtual Nurse, an interactive new age application that helps triage your need to see a doctor.
Check out the latest in remote vital signs monitoring using the  ViSi Mobile® System
Learn how researchers, providers, and payers use genomics to improve medical outcomes using the Discovery Biomedical Data Platform
Use Inside Tracker to identify the nutritional, supplemental, lifestyle, and exercise interventions most needed to improve your health
Give your patients a personalized medical video using Telesofia Medical, a platform aimed at increasing patient compliance and reducing health care costs
Sequence your microbiome using citizen science with uBiome.
Get the benefits of a two-hour workout in only 20 minutes with Vasper System’s SA-1Learn how the Due Date Plus mobile health platform is making pregnancy healthier, safer, and cheaper.



Monday, December 3, 2012

Abundance - Peter Diamandis (and what's in it for eHealth)

abundance book by diamandis and kotler


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."