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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 sensors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sensors. Show all posts
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Musing on the Interaxon Muse Meditation Headband
"For this calibration, find a comfortable position and take a deep breath".
The computer brain interface world is getting interesting. The first time I heard about these types of MUSE brainwave sensing devices was an experiment where they trained people to move a cursor on a computer screen using their brain waves and a EEG headband. Maybe it was the MUSE - not sure. The next thing they did was have those same people change the colour of the floodlights on Niagara Falls and the CN Tower using their entrained brainwaves.
I have seen more than several research projects now that have involved the Interaxon Muse headband - a device that self-directs users into a calm state of meditation by reading their brainwaves through an EEG headband and translating the data into a meditation tracking app. It may be just the start before EEG caps and gels and wire attachments are a thing of the past.
The McMaster university library recently started loaning out this device so instead of buying one (about $400) I have borrowed one for a week. Mind you, I have 35 years of meditation experience in a variety of schools and techniques and am not expecting a device like this to teach me anything. But after taking an 8 week online mindfulness course - just videos and online instructions - I believe that meditation can be taught through technology.
After downloading the app and fumbling around trying to fit it on my head - should have looked at the visuals in the instructions - I learned how to sync my brainwaves using the app on the ipad. I tried a 3 minute meditation in the living room while the TV was on, a laptop was playing a video in the background and I was talking to my wife who was doing her yoga exercises. My brainwaves during those 3 minutes were in the noisy/active category. I had scored no calm points and I heard zero "birds". Hearing birds means that your brainwaves are staying in a calm meditative space. Seeing a graph of my brainwaves is actually very interesting but scoring points for meditating well and being asked if I want to share that on Facebook or Twitter is another thing. Tempting though to show all my friends on social media what a noisy mess my brainwaves are - No!
I was sort of impressed with the app interface and the instructions by the MUSE meditation guide. The next time I tried it I sat in my meditation room on my meditation cushion and zabuton. I extended the time to 7 minutes. I chose the default beach imagery with the sound of lapping waves and wind. If you hear the wind, it is actually the sound of your own brainwaves making noise. You are not watching your breath. I sat in the half lotus posture with my hands in my lap, a classic meditation posture I have practiced for years. The resulting graph of my brainwaves after 7 minutes indicated that I had no active or noisy points - 98% calm state of mind and about 100 birds. I could actually hear the birds in the background if I turned up the volume. Here is a picture of my stats. In my last 20 minute sessions the batteries in the MUSE drained and I had to resume twice so the stats are all thrown off.
It is getting interesting but I spent the rest of the day thinking that I have been under surveillance with my brainwaves subjected to mechanical replication and analysis. This experience was not at all a natural process, in spite of the kind and soft voice of the human guide behind the algorithms on the app. My gurus had years and years of training and practice in meditation before they were allowed to teach. I didn't let that get to me because I am fascinated with the technology.
The next sitting session I tried 20 minutes - about the amount of my usual meditation time these days. The result was 100% in the calm space, over 200 birds, and no "recoveries" or straying outside the calm zone with distracted thought or lapse of attention to mindfulness of breathing. And that was just a "normal" session for me.
I am really impressed with this device but I am sure that I don't need it having learned the art and science of meditation the traditional way - sitting at the feet of the masters, going on retreats, and practicing daily. My real question and concern is how will this device work with digital natives and those new to meditation?
We live in a world of secular ethics and this device does not come attached to any religious ideology. We all know by now that a mindfulness of breathing practice cuts across the sectarian world. Creating calm brain waves just requires the right guidance and intervention. Is total reliance on the MUSE soulless and alienating? Not necessarily, though I would probably recommend an online mindfulness of meditation course called Palouse Mindfulness rather than the MUSE for a true beginner - especially ones who are remote from teachers and centres and can't afford the cost. One of the practices in one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism is Lam Rim. Lam Rim literally means "gradual path". The gradual path to meditative calm is the best way.
Here is one tip from my Zen teacher on meditation that will help anyone understand the nature of mind and meditation. Sitting across from me at a table the teacher gave me a piece of paper and a pencil. He asked me to draw a small line to count each time I had a thought. It became obvious to me that the page would quickly fill up with counts of scattered thoughts. After sitting in meditation practice, the number of counts becomes noticeably fewer. Where did all those thoughts go? It is just a state of being.
The computer brain interface world is getting interesting. The first time I heard about these types of MUSE brainwave sensing devices was an experiment where they trained people to move a cursor on a computer screen using their brain waves and a EEG headband. Maybe it was the MUSE - not sure. The next thing they did was have those same people change the colour of the floodlights on Niagara Falls and the CN Tower using their entrained brainwaves.
I have seen more than several research projects now that have involved the Interaxon Muse headband - a device that self-directs users into a calm state of meditation by reading their brainwaves through an EEG headband and translating the data into a meditation tracking app. It may be just the start before EEG caps and gels and wire attachments are a thing of the past.
The McMaster university library recently started loaning out this device so instead of buying one (about $400) I have borrowed one for a week. Mind you, I have 35 years of meditation experience in a variety of schools and techniques and am not expecting a device like this to teach me anything. But after taking an 8 week online mindfulness course - just videos and online instructions - I believe that meditation can be taught through technology.
After downloading the app and fumbling around trying to fit it on my head - should have looked at the visuals in the instructions - I learned how to sync my brainwaves using the app on the ipad. I tried a 3 minute meditation in the living room while the TV was on, a laptop was playing a video in the background and I was talking to my wife who was doing her yoga exercises. My brainwaves during those 3 minutes were in the noisy/active category. I had scored no calm points and I heard zero "birds". Hearing birds means that your brainwaves are staying in a calm meditative space. Seeing a graph of my brainwaves is actually very interesting but scoring points for meditating well and being asked if I want to share that on Facebook or Twitter is another thing. Tempting though to show all my friends on social media what a noisy mess my brainwaves are - No!
I was sort of impressed with the app interface and the instructions by the MUSE meditation guide. The next time I tried it I sat in my meditation room on my meditation cushion and zabuton. I extended the time to 7 minutes. I chose the default beach imagery with the sound of lapping waves and wind. If you hear the wind, it is actually the sound of your own brainwaves making noise. You are not watching your breath. I sat in the half lotus posture with my hands in my lap, a classic meditation posture I have practiced for years. The resulting graph of my brainwaves after 7 minutes indicated that I had no active or noisy points - 98% calm state of mind and about 100 birds. I could actually hear the birds in the background if I turned up the volume. Here is a picture of my stats. In my last 20 minute sessions the batteries in the MUSE drained and I had to resume twice so the stats are all thrown off.
It is getting interesting but I spent the rest of the day thinking that I have been under surveillance with my brainwaves subjected to mechanical replication and analysis. This experience was not at all a natural process, in spite of the kind and soft voice of the human guide behind the algorithms on the app. My gurus had years and years of training and practice in meditation before they were allowed to teach. I didn't let that get to me because I am fascinated with the technology.
The next sitting session I tried 20 minutes - about the amount of my usual meditation time these days. The result was 100% in the calm space, over 200 birds, and no "recoveries" or straying outside the calm zone with distracted thought or lapse of attention to mindfulness of breathing. And that was just a "normal" session for me.
I am really impressed with this device but I am sure that I don't need it having learned the art and science of meditation the traditional way - sitting at the feet of the masters, going on retreats, and practicing daily. My real question and concern is how will this device work with digital natives and those new to meditation?
We live in a world of secular ethics and this device does not come attached to any religious ideology. We all know by now that a mindfulness of breathing practice cuts across the sectarian world. Creating calm brain waves just requires the right guidance and intervention. Is total reliance on the MUSE soulless and alienating? Not necessarily, though I would probably recommend an online mindfulness of meditation course called Palouse Mindfulness rather than the MUSE for a true beginner - especially ones who are remote from teachers and centres and can't afford the cost. One of the practices in one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism is Lam Rim. Lam Rim literally means "gradual path". The gradual path to meditative calm is the best way.
Here is one tip from my Zen teacher on meditation that will help anyone understand the nature of mind and meditation. Sitting across from me at a table the teacher gave me a piece of paper and a pencil. He asked me to draw a small line to count each time I had a thought. It became obvious to me that the page would quickly fill up with counts of scattered thoughts. After sitting in meditation practice, the number of counts becomes noticeably fewer. Where did all those thoughts go? It is just a state of being.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
The "sousveillance" world of Steve Mann
When I studied the use of RFID in healthcare I was amazed at the possibilities for this technology and it's essential humanness. An RFID barcode is much safer for an infirm patient because the identification or drug dosage on the RFID signal can be picked up without having to move the patient. A barcode, on the other hand, might be on a wrist under a sleeping patient, so they would have to be turned over in order to scan the bar code in line of sight. RFID technology was also great for keeping track of physical assets like infusion pumps, and inventory replenishment systems. On the other hand, keeping track of people presented some ethical and privacy concerns because people would be under the impression that they would be constantly under surveillance. When the word "surveillance" is used, Big Brother rears its ugly head.
Surveillance needn't be a fearful word even though it has a strong presence in security organizations and anti-terrorism. There are forms of surveillance in public health that can be beneficial for the health and welfare of society, such as syndromic surveillance, even though that too may have had some origins in state security, i.e. finding out where that anthrax threat was.
One thing I like about the wearable computer work of Steve Mann is his bold claim that the eye-tap or video glasses he created and wears present to society a form of what he calls "sousveillance", which is a much more nuanced, benign or human form of it's evil cousin - mentioned above. Sousveillance is an understated way of trying to balance the power of who is watching who. For some totally unknown reason it reminds me of the anti-sus dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson. The anti-sus laws, or suspected person vagrancy laws in 19th century Britain might have nothing to do with sousveillance, but I am sure Steve Mann has had that feeling of being considered a suspicious and unwelcome person. Racial profiling for cyborgs? His McVeillance experience is indicative of that.
Now try to imagine a year in the future when everyone is wearing eye-tap video devices of that type Steve Mann and then Google developed. Maybe this is in 2020,( appropriate for seeing perfectly), and maybe it is not, but won't this mean that everyone we see on the street, and their dog, will be the equivalent of a Google Street View with a 24/7 refresh rate? And then ask yourself what does this do for for privacy laws, and you will have to wonder why the privacy commissioner of Canada wrote a letter to the lawyers at Google in 2007 to say that Google Street View would break all of Canada's privacy laws if it was implemented! It is interesting to try and imagine this future and one science fiction book I read by Charles Stross, called Halting State did exactly that. It was a murder mystery inside a video game but the real life police all had video recording visors they were obligated and/or controlled to wear on the job, recording all the visual details of their day to day investigations. Surveillance technology may not have been extended to all citizenry, but now the details are slipping away on me - read it a few years ago.
Notions of privacy will be changing beyond a doubt. Even now in different cultures there are different notions of privacy and proxemics. I think it was Iceland that lists your tax return information in the phone book or something like that. Imagine if we all started using Augmented Reality eye-tap devices, like the ones on the veillance.org website which are tied into redundantly backed-up servers. Imagine people walking through hospitals with such wearable devices scanning people sitting in the STD clinic waiting rooms. Personal space is being violated in terms of personal health information (PHI). The technology is wonderful though. As Personal Health Records are being developed (even with HL7 standards) a problem area is how to capture and store personal information submitted by the patient, not the physician, and how to make that information intelligible. Streams of data from daily blood tests, BP, and now possibly wearable computer video images, needs to managed and made relevant somehow. On the other hand, IT and policy specialists in healthcare have mostly normalized the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon.
Another notion of privacy that might need to change is the idea that PHI is always private. Some people are already posting their PHI on facebook and they don't care if it is public. In rare cases we have even heard that this has saved lives. I have personally heard research participants with rare and chronic health conditions who are posting their personal health records as widely on the internet as possible in order to obtain possible help or insight for future research. It is technologically possible I suppose to put PHI and other forms of identification into Augmented Reality "fields of vision" for other persons with wearable devices to readily pick up. The only thing stopping people from doing that is the notions of privacy and their willingness to consent to have that out there in the public domain.
I like Steve's distinction (on wikipedia - or brilliant IEEE article ) between surveillance and sousveillance:
It is within this realm of "personal sousveillance" that the work of Steve Mann as applied to health informatics, is really to going to shine. Steve was one of the original group who helped secure funding for the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto, which is a world leading health informatics incubator. Steve has also done some research using sousveillance on hand hygiene to reduce hospital infections. There are other more bold applications, of course, like using google glass in surgeries or dentistries for training and/or assisted learning.
In my own small way I am also trying to think through the "legal, ethical and policy issues", as Steve says, here on this blog. Those at the Institute for Ethics of Emerging Technology are also doing that "in spades", and there is a recent article about Steve Mann and sousveillance on it (here). Steve has recently argued for "legal" rights for sousveillance in an editorial for MIT technology review. Veilliance has become a study in itself, in all it's various forms, as Steve leads a Veillance conference and research group, which it would appear I made a blog post about last year< here >.
I could also blend in here a discussion related to the ethics of self-experimentation (and hat tip again to the folks on the CAREB Linkedin group for that article). Mostly we have known about clinical self-experimentation, and in social sciences/humanities there are '"autoethnographies", but now with the development of new technologies people are trying their own DYI experiments. I saw an TVO Agenda program (Mysteries of the Mind - Tomorrow's Brain ) that discussed the health benefits for improving cognitive function and mental health using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) where the panel experts played a youtube video they had discovered and discussed the guy in it who hooked his brain up to his own home-made TMS device. In the video we see the guy, when he turns on the electricity, explaining: "Just saw a white flash". So don't do this at home kids!
Steve Mann is not a guinea pig. He isn't a research subject. He is the subject of his own research. Developing and wearing computers is something he has done since he was a kid, so he is just using evolutionary momentum for whatever agile developments that improve his cybernetic state of well being. An oversight committee at his place of employment might recommend a technology ethics review, but we have to think that Steve is largely "self-employed" with this system, "dug in like a tick", and there ain't no separating him from this life experiment with digitally enhanced awareness. Anyway, Steve would fight back against anything "oversight". The dangers of any research involving humans is that researchers to a certain extent "have blinders on" and are biased towards their own methodologies and perceptions of risk, and thus lose objectivity.
I don't know who said "the pull of the future is greater than the push from the past", but I do remember the person who I heard it from. Whoever it was must have imagined some strange and distant world waiting to be born. That is the sousveillance world of Steve Mann.
Surveillance needn't be a fearful word even though it has a strong presence in security organizations and anti-terrorism. There are forms of surveillance in public health that can be beneficial for the health and welfare of society, such as syndromic surveillance, even though that too may have had some origins in state security, i.e. finding out where that anthrax threat was.
One thing I like about the wearable computer work of Steve Mann is his bold claim that the eye-tap or video glasses he created and wears present to society a form of what he calls "sousveillance", which is a much more nuanced, benign or human form of it's evil cousin - mentioned above. Sousveillance is an understated way of trying to balance the power of who is watching who. For some totally unknown reason it reminds me of the anti-sus dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson. The anti-sus laws, or suspected person vagrancy laws in 19th century Britain might have nothing to do with sousveillance, but I am sure Steve Mann has had that feeling of being considered a suspicious and unwelcome person. Racial profiling for cyborgs? His McVeillance experience is indicative of that.
Now try to imagine a year in the future when everyone is wearing eye-tap video devices of that type Steve Mann and then Google developed. Maybe this is in 2020,( appropriate for seeing perfectly), and maybe it is not, but won't this mean that everyone we see on the street, and their dog, will be the equivalent of a Google Street View with a 24/7 refresh rate? And then ask yourself what does this do for for privacy laws, and you will have to wonder why the privacy commissioner of Canada wrote a letter to the lawyers at Google in 2007 to say that Google Street View would break all of Canada's privacy laws if it was implemented! It is interesting to try and imagine this future and one science fiction book I read by Charles Stross, called Halting State did exactly that. It was a murder mystery inside a video game but the real life police all had video recording visors they were obligated and/or controlled to wear on the job, recording all the visual details of their day to day investigations. Surveillance technology may not have been extended to all citizenry, but now the details are slipping away on me - read it a few years ago.
Notions of privacy will be changing beyond a doubt. Even now in different cultures there are different notions of privacy and proxemics. I think it was Iceland that lists your tax return information in the phone book or something like that. Imagine if we all started using Augmented Reality eye-tap devices, like the ones on the veillance.org website which are tied into redundantly backed-up servers. Imagine people walking through hospitals with such wearable devices scanning people sitting in the STD clinic waiting rooms. Personal space is being violated in terms of personal health information (PHI). The technology is wonderful though. As Personal Health Records are being developed (even with HL7 standards) a problem area is how to capture and store personal information submitted by the patient, not the physician, and how to make that information intelligible. Streams of data from daily blood tests, BP, and now possibly wearable computer video images, needs to managed and made relevant somehow. On the other hand, IT and policy specialists in healthcare have mostly normalized the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon.
Another notion of privacy that might need to change is the idea that PHI is always private. Some people are already posting their PHI on facebook and they don't care if it is public. In rare cases we have even heard that this has saved lives. I have personally heard research participants with rare and chronic health conditions who are posting their personal health records as widely on the internet as possible in order to obtain possible help or insight for future research. It is technologically possible I suppose to put PHI and other forms of identification into Augmented Reality "fields of vision" for other persons with wearable devices to readily pick up. The only thing stopping people from doing that is the notions of privacy and their willingness to consent to have that out there in the public domain.
I like Steve's distinction (on wikipedia - or brilliant IEEE article ) between surveillance and sousveillance:
Personal sousveillance is the art, science, and technology of personal experience capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission, such as lifelong audiovisual recording by way of cybernetic prosthetics, such as seeing-aids, visual memory aids, and the like. Even today's personal sousveillance technologies like camera phones and weblogs tend to build a sense of community, in contrast to surveillance that some have said is corrosive to community.[29]
The legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding personal sousveillance are largely yet to be explored, but there are close parallels to the social and legal norms surrounding recording of telephone conversations. When one or more parties to the conversation record it, we call that sousveillance, whereas when the conversation is recorded by a person who is not a party to the conversation (such as a prison guard violating a client-lawyer relationship), we call the recording "surveillance".
It is within this realm of "personal sousveillance" that the work of Steve Mann as applied to health informatics, is really to going to shine. Steve was one of the original group who helped secure funding for the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation at the University of Toronto, which is a world leading health informatics incubator. Steve has also done some research using sousveillance on hand hygiene to reduce hospital infections. There are other more bold applications, of course, like using google glass in surgeries or dentistries for training and/or assisted learning.
In my own small way I am also trying to think through the "legal, ethical and policy issues", as Steve says, here on this blog. Those at the Institute for Ethics of Emerging Technology are also doing that "in spades", and there is a recent article about Steve Mann and sousveillance on it (here). Steve has recently argued for "legal" rights for sousveillance in an editorial for MIT technology review. Veilliance has become a study in itself, in all it's various forms, as Steve leads a Veillance conference and research group, which it would appear I made a blog post about last year< here >.
I could also blend in here a discussion related to the ethics of self-experimentation (and hat tip again to the folks on the CAREB Linkedin group for that article). Mostly we have known about clinical self-experimentation, and in social sciences/humanities there are '"autoethnographies", but now with the development of new technologies people are trying their own DYI experiments. I saw an TVO Agenda program (Mysteries of the Mind - Tomorrow's Brain ) that discussed the health benefits for improving cognitive function and mental health using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) where the panel experts played a youtube video they had discovered and discussed the guy in it who hooked his brain up to his own home-made TMS device. In the video we see the guy, when he turns on the electricity, explaining: "Just saw a white flash". So don't do this at home kids!
Steve Mann is not a guinea pig. He isn't a research subject. He is the subject of his own research. Developing and wearing computers is something he has done since he was a kid, so he is just using evolutionary momentum for whatever agile developments that improve his cybernetic state of well being. An oversight committee at his place of employment might recommend a technology ethics review, but we have to think that Steve is largely "self-employed" with this system, "dug in like a tick", and there ain't no separating him from this life experiment with digitally enhanced awareness. Anyway, Steve would fight back against anything "oversight". The dangers of any research involving humans is that researchers to a certain extent "have blinders on" and are biased towards their own methodologies and perceptions of risk, and thus lose objectivity.
I don't know who said "the pull of the future is greater than the push from the past", but I do remember the person who I heard it from. Whoever it was must have imagined some strange and distant world waiting to be born. That is the sousveillance world of Steve Mann.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
A different kind of google glass - contact lens that detects glucose for diabetics
Google X is a "moonshot" group of experimental projects Google is exploring. A recent news story about one of these projects is hitting the media called Google Contact Lens. The premise behind this is one of the holy grails of diabetes research, finding a "pin-prick-less" way to test for glucose levels. I did a study of the various devices under-going development and the history is a bitter one of trial and error, fraud and failure. To my knowledge, there is no FDA approved device yet that can do this. I will set up an email alert for more news about this in the future. CBC technology coverage is great. Here is some info from our working paper on a mobile solution for self-management of diabetes:
A non-invasive technique capable of measuring blood glucose concentration with accuracy equal to or better than the current chemical glucose meters may improve compliance for glucose monitoring. 53 Considerable efforts have been made by several scientific research groups and organizations in the past few decades to develop non-invasive blood glucose monitors. Diverse optical approaches have been proposed to achieve this objective. These approaches include polarimetry, Raman spectroscopy, near-infrared (NIR), absorption and scattering and photoacoustics. These techniques appear to be promising, but have limitations associated with low sensitivity, accuracy and insufficient specificity of glucose measurements at physiologically relevant levels. 53 Non-invasive continuous Glucose Monitors like GlucoWatch G2 Biographer and Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) which are FDA approved have been found unreliable for detecting hypoglycemia. 54 There are non-invasive solutions available in Canada for measuring blood glucose level by BioSign Technologies’ UFIT Care. 25 However, this product is yet to be approved by Health Canada and therefore, cannot be used.And various references to the above:
23. Medgadget. MedGadget Web site.
http://www.medgadget.com. Published 2009.
Updated 2009. Accessed november 2009.
24. Pain-free precision: Clinical trial
reveals new option for blood sugar testing. . 2002;1 No 2.
25. Biosign Technologies Inc: Online Health Monitoring, Getting the
Numbers Right Fact Sheet. http://www.biosign.com/Web_Files/factsheet_biosign.pdf.
Updated 2009november 2009.
53. Kirill V, Mohsen S, Montamedi M,
Esenaliev R. Noninvasive Blood Glucose Monitoring With Optical Coherence
Tomography. Diabetes Care.
2002;25(12). http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/25/12/2263.abstract.
54. Accuracy of the GlucoWatch G2
Biographer and the Continuous Glucose Monitoring System During Hypoglycemia. Diabetes care. 2004;27(3).
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/3/722.abstract.
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