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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 Vision Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vision Research. Show all posts

Sunday, April 23, 2017

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 Hackathons...https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28250965 came up with a research article that shows that Hacking Health does have very useful benefits. I am intrigue and would even like to do my own research on this.

I attended a pitch workshop and learned that intellectual property on ideas is not what it appears to be. From that perspective, and in the interests of ehealth promotion:

1. Medical School ePortfolio - So you want be a Doctor eh? [app, educational]
Problem:
Getting into medical school is like a lottery. Or is it? How can students best prepare so they don't become disappointed or feel like they are gambling getting in, or getting in and realizing it is not their ideal career choice?

Solution:
This app will be for students who want to be physicians. Maybe it could even be aimed at three levels; elementary, high school, and university. It would allow students to track their interest in a career in medicine from early days. Students are also getting into medical school after high school these days at Queens University. It could have tests and quizzes, links to schools, CV prep, volunteer opportunity suggestions, how to apply, what's involved in the actual application process at very schools. The book "So you want to be Doctor eh?" by Anne Berdl is an excellent resource to model this on. Also, many universities have learning portfolios and that is also a model. Possible mentor relationships or chats or talks with professionals in the field. By tests and quizzes, it could also have an educational role to survey student empathy, compassion training, aptitude, in addition to preparation for MCAT and other formal tests.

2.Smart Forms Builder for Healthcare [ app, software]
Problem:
Hospitals were faced with a crisis in screening patients and visitors for SARS at Ontario hospitals in 2003. The paper system they had was bogging down entry to the hospital. A LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) online screening system was eventually created to streamline the process. Healthcare administrators and even IT need to develop online forms quickly without programming skills as well as have access to useful data.

Solution:
There are smartform software systems like Google docs and commercial ones like Jotform, but they are not private and secure for personal health information. As well, smart forms need to be smart enough so people without programming experience can quickly develop an application. These kind of systems are evolving, but they just need something more akin to artificial intelligence to make them really smart and inexpensive to setup. API, mobile and REST applications would also be good integration components.

3. eHealth enabled browser [ browser, app, big data]
Problem:
Personal Health Records come in many different types, tethered, stand alone, and integrated. The  people who benefit most are those who need to monitor and access a lot of medical records and visits. However, tracking health, IOT, and fitness device data can be integrated into Personal Health Records to create an overall digital health snapshot. Not everyone likes to login to a portal and track their health data.

Solution:
The idea here is to integrate Watson IBM analytics, or google alpha Go search engine analytics built into a dedicated open source browser built on chrome (or chromium). While this might sound just like an app running on a smartphone, the idea is to build a Firefox, Chrome or Safari browser that is actually a dedicated health analytics and digital health single sign on personal health record browser. What you search and read in every day life is all fodder for personal health anlaytics. This is digital "google flu" writ larger for an individual. In a way, think of it is a browser add on or extension that is a personal health record data collector, storage, and dashboard, but it is actually the browser itself.

4. Universal Healthcare Observatory [Big Data app]
Problem:

The problem is that not everyone has access to free healthcare. Statistically, millions of people are rising out of poverty every year, according to the late Global Health researcher Hans Rosling. Access to free or affordable healthcare should be a basic human right.

Solution:
The purpose of the project is based on the scientific based belief of evidence based medicine that "for profit healthcare is hazardous to your health". The United Nations and even the WHO have many observatories, and this one would be similar to the European Observatory of Health Systems and Policies. It will be a big data app that pulls data and statistics from disparate sources to monitor the global healthcare systems in the world and promote any trends towards universal healthcare. It might be able to use the Trendalyzer software. The bold target would be to achieve universal access to free or affordable healthcare for everyone on the planet by 2050.

5. eHealth Garage [ infrastructure, service]
Problem:
In my neighbourhood there are two former automobile/gas stations that are now a Vietnamese restaurant and a Holistic Health Clinic. Gas stations used be found on almost every block in every neighbourhood in every city and town. Cars no longer break down because the technology is better and gas monopolies are pushing gas stations out of neighbourhoods. Needless to say, electric cars are moving in soon. Also in my neighbourhood is a legal Medical Marijuana Clinic. Why not an eHealth Garage?

Solution:
With an aging population living longer and a coming generations that might may well live easily way over 100 years of age because of advances in exponential medicine, preventive medicine and holistic health services need to be accessible with digital health services in the community. This is also a way to deconstruct medicine.The eHealth Garage could be a component of a Family Health Team but they might call it an eHealth clinic. I see the Garage being full of healthcare technology: x-ray machines, ultrasound, MRI, fitbits, resistance training gym machines, Transcranial Magnetic Stimluation (TMS) - almost any health technology that can be coupled with a digital health technology or record. DIY healthcare, though with options for professional healthcare oversight.



Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Interesting times for the visually impaired - technologically speaking!

These are interesting times for the visual impaired, technologically speaking at least. The number of advances in technologies for the eyes and the eye-brain interface, because a lot of the impairment is in our heads, has really started to amaze me, and they seem to be occurring every day. An idea to write a blog post on this has been brewing for sometime. This post was sparked by a story I read today about a little girl of seven years of age who was blind almost since birth because of a stroke and who was not allowed to carry her white cane (that is a technology too!)  to school. Not such an interesting time for her because it is a health and safety concern?

Also today I read about a bionic lens made by Ocumetrics that will return better than 20/20 vision by 3 times. That is in clinical trials but the promise is an 8 minute out patient "surgery". Just a couple of weeks ago I heard about a technology discovery that could replace our weak eye lenses with an LCD equivalent - liquid crystal sight - like having a smartphone camera lens implanted in our eyeballs and connected through the nervous system to the brain. That would really help, maybe even cure, older folks with presbyopia.

The idea that technology was rapidly moving ahead to aid the visually impaired occurred to me more than several years ago when I was made aware of a research study involving smartphones and the blind. In there was the idea that crowdsourcing could help the blind in a very simple way - especially those times when they were in a bit of a bind. All they have to do is use their smartphone to take a picture of the object of thing they can't identify, for example, a soup can, upload the picture to a crowdsourcing website, and wait for one of the minions who make working there a 24/7 enterprise. After a short wait in the kitchen they get a text to speech email spelling out for them the "tomato soup can" they wanted to open for lunch.

What if they could even eliminate the crowdfunding middle person? Yes, let's impoverish those already impoverished Mechanical Turks working for pennies again!  Why not just upload the image to a search engine that can identify images? It would have to be one customized to return a text to speech SMS. Then again we would have to trust in the artificial intelligence of the image recognition software. There is an ethical dilemma there, because that might not be a can of tomato soup for lunch! Another way to look at that is computer image recognition software that could read braille and translate it into text to speech? Google informs me via Wikipedia that that might be called "optical braille recognition". That idea occurred to me today when I saw a potentially new prothesis that can sense touch.


Of course, one of the great pioneers of all of this, Ray Kurzweil, was inspired to invent in order to help the visually impaired. He developed many text to speech products, like a Reading Machine that advanced Optical Character Recognition, Flatbed Scanners, and Text to Speech. One of his customers was the truly great though blind musician Stevie Wonder who got him into music apparently, and the Kurzweil synthesizers followed.

One of the most breath taking of the smartphone app devices to help the visually impaired is the KNFB reader. This is an app for a smartphone that allows the blind to pick up text off of virtually anything. This youtube video illustrates how it is used very well:

I have a personal interesting in the technology for visual impairments because I have amblyopia, or lazy eye. I have blogged a little about the video game intervention research that is so exciting as a novel and interesting way for kids to potentially fully regain vision in their lazy eye.  The game technology devices are getting more customized (sort of binocular suppression- see Hess, McGill University) as researches learn more about how the brain works. I have been in a clinical trial to see if adults can regain visual ability in the lazy. Not that much success for me but I am still keenly interested in it. I am especially interested given the fact that Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in a certain area of the brain and at a certain frequency will restore perfect vision in adults with lazy eye, but only for 45 minutes! See, it is really all just in our heads! Eventually the bridge will be made there, I am hoping, without having to shock ourselves under that infinite loop coil of the TMS device more than several times a day.

There are a lot of other technologies for visual aids for professionals. There is an infrared visual smart glasses that let nurses see the veins in the arm better for intravenous needles. Google glass looks promising for some professional healthcare occupations, even in the surgery. Apparently Facebook is also working on ways to help the blind "see images".

Another smartphone development by a group called Peek Vision offers promising low cost diagnostic or comprehensive eye exam software on a smartphone. Needless to say, because it is mobil, remote villages in Kenya and elsewhere can now intercept patients with potentially serious eye or other health conditions:
http://www.peekvision.org/about-us

I realize of course that I could keep adding to this list of new technologies, as I am doing now several months after posting. Since I got the TED app that has Chromecast, I found this talk by Chieko Asakawa from IBM, who is blind herself, on How Technology Helps Blind People Explore Our World: https://www.ted.com/talks/chieko_asakawa_how_new_technology_helps_blind_people_explore_the_world?language=en

What about a Kindle style braille ebook reader?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3399018/Braille-Kindle-developed-blind-Tactile-tablet-allow-people-feel-images-text-screen.html