News & Updates
Joichi Ito has been named director of the MIT Media Lab. A vocal advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom, Ito is board chair and former CEO of Creative Commons, sits on the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, founded Eccosys and was an early investor in more than 40 companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, Kongregate, Kickstarter, and Twitter. Ito succeeds Frank Moss, who was director of the Media Lab for the past five years. If you’re info-streams haven’t already been swamped by this news, just know that that this is the nerd equivalent of the Royal Wedding.
Patients Are Not Consumers according to NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist, Paul Krugman in his latest piece on the House’s attempts to reduce health care costs. If you’re at all into Patients 2.0 or the struggle to balance ethical care with ethical spending, this is well worth a quick read.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out e-Patient Dave’s TEDx Maaschtricht from the Netherlands earlier this month. The video is up and getting plenty of hits. You can also watch his interview with Dutch medical magazine, Medisch Contact.
Chicago Health 2.0 is breaking the news about HealthBox, a new accelerator that will take its place alongside Rock Health in San Francisco and Blueprint Health in New York City. It will be run by the local Chicago startup community, SandBox Industries. Working to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in the healthcare sector, SandBox Industries helps to fill the gap in funding available for very early stage start-ups that aren’t quite ready for Series A. Check out the full story at Health 2.0′s Chicago Chapter.
BodyMedia a pioneer in developing wearable body monitoring and weight management systems, just announced a new way for Sprint customers to understand their calorie balance and create personalized workouts with the Sprint BodyMedia ID pack. This service offers a customized bundle of widgets, applications, wallpapers, ringtones and other content for Android owners in search of their quantified-selves.
Dr. Val Jones is sick of Twitter and Facebook health misinformation. She would like to get a small group of volunteer experts together – healthcare professionals committed to science and common sense – to have them per-review links before they are promoted on Twitter. She has created a new Twitter account called “HealthyRT” to which the volunteer experts will have access to and can use to promote content that is medically sound. Click here to learn more about Val’s initiative.
When confronted with a shockingly high number during a routine cholesterol check at work, Juhan Sonin realized that he knew nothing about his own health metrics. The experience led him to develop a tool called HealthCard to address the question, “How do I become an informed and empowered patient?” Check out his (rather entertaining) entry at the Journal of Participatory Medicine, Hacking Health: Designing for Understanding My Health.
Last month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on sexual behavior that used a technique with laptops (instead of human interviewers) to gather data on Americans’ attraction and identity by age, marital status, education and race. Anjani Chandra, the lead author, explained in the NYTimes article that the process was developed to assure total anonymity for the respondents. This computer mediated methodology got a whopping 75 percent response rate! Very high for a household survey that interviewed more than 13,000 people ages 15 to 44 from 2006 to 2008.
David Harlow’s Health Care Law Blog featured a great take on last week’s medical social media debacle where a physician in Rhode Island was fired for a Facebook faux pas and is now being fined by the state medical board. Check out the full article on our sister site, THCB or David’s Health Blawg
The Chicago Tribune featured an article on hospital design, noise pollution and how the clamor of modern, technologically enabled, medicine might be working against patients and staff. A growing body of research on noise and health suggests unwanted sound wrecks sleep, raises stress levels, induces medical mistakes and contributes to alarm fatigue and safety issues. Worldwide, the sound levels inside hospitals average 72 decibels during the day and 60 decibels at night — far exceeding the standard of 40 decibels or less, set by the World Health Organization.
PatientsLikeMe, one of our favorite patient social networking and data collection sites, has published a patient-driven study refuting a previous paper suggesting that lithium could help people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The findings highlight how internet-based tracking tools can enable patients to explore medical questions most relevant to them in a way that augments traditional clinical research. Check out the full story at MITs Technology Review.
Friendster will erase all user photos, blogs and more on May 31 but does so with a nod to data portability. The site is now encouraging all users to use the ‘Friendster Exporter’ app to download or export their profile information, friends list, photos, messages, comments, testimonials, shoutouts, blogs and groups. The new Friendster should be going live in the coming weeks and will focus mainly on Asian users. See the full obituary story at TechCrunch.
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