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.

eHealth Sources of Wellness

Disclaimer: opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the policy of McMaster University, where I am employed.

I was checking the student wellness website at McMaster and immediately saw the eHealth application and benefit. First, there was a list of apps for smartphones on wellness and fitness <here>. Since I don't have a smartphone I can't testify about the worth of these apps. All I know is that everybody (and their dog) these days you see on the street is staring more at a phone than anything else in the environment. McMaster's employees website also have excellent resources for health and wellness, part of that movement toward corporate wholeness and a healthy workplace.

Another one of the great resources I found on the McMaster website was a link to a depression symptom checker. Now, that is the sort of thing you can find on some of the major consumer health websites, but this depression checklist was very good - had received research testing, face validity, evaluation etc. Problem is, I can't find the link to it now, but it was kind of like this one < here >. Maybe that is why people use the common consumer health websites - stuff is easy to find there. The thing is, if depression is part of ones' own personal health inventory, these should be integrated into one's personal health record, which should be easy to find, and accessed as often as one uses a tooth brush.

Should a personal health record also include apps and records for wellness and fitness, and counselling resources, and yoga videos, dental x-rays, MMR shots, etc.? Yes I think they should. This was also a question I once asked the late Kevin Leonard at a health informatics conference. At that time people at the conference were thinking mostly about personal health records as portal views of the physician's electronic medical record. Kevin thought everything related to one's health should be accessible in a electronic health record. Dr. Leonard was one of the leading advocates for personal wellness in the age of electronic health records. When I learned that he died of complications from pneumonia and that he had Crohns, I can understand more his personal mission. Why can't there just be One Record? < Patient Destiny >

Surgery transmitted by Google glass

Google glass apparently wasn't used here first, according to a poster at the Kurzweil site:

Great accomplishment BUT not the 1st time! It was a FutureMed/Singularity grad who performed the first Surgery s GoogleGlass! See:
Google Glass In The Operating Room! http://t.co/bMR64jVCTQ
&in Med Ed”OK Glass:Teach me Medicine!” http://t.co/0vYPZcrzKk

The spanish Clinica Cemtro looks like an interesting organization with eHealth applications like this, even though I am not sure how this can be applied in the future.

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.

https://www.crowdmed.com/

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:

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.