Medical professionals are increasingly embracing mobile apps. They enable patients to track and share their metrics with doctors, and let caregivers monitor treatments and guide patients following surgery or other procedures. Now an app released earlier this year targets the core function of doctors—helping them diagnose and treat diseases. More
Tag Index / Showing 1 - 10 of 10 results for “medicine”
Individualized Cancer Treatment Coming—But Only If Underdogs Prevail
Decades ago, “personalized medicine” meant “don’t give penicillin to the person who is fatally allergic to it.” Today, the phrase is shorthand for the ambitious but achievable concept of targeting medications to a specific group of people, based on genetic information, disease progression, biomarkers, and other factors. Still, there’s a small but growing force in the biomedical community that takes the notion of “personalized medicine” much further. For them the term is used literally—they aim for treatment options custom-crafted for the unique snowflakes that we are. More
Digital Medicine: Diagnostic Stickers and Pills That Talk Back to You
Often, the biggest battle in monitoring our health is remembering. Remembering to take our prescriptions every day (and ideally at the same time) to manage preexisting conditions. Remembering to track developing symptoms to diagnose new diseases. It's a lot to remember, but there are plenty of apps out there to help us. Still, no matter how many apps we download, how can we be sure they actually get us to do what we're supposed to? New sensor technology in the form of wearables—and even ingestibles—could increasingly play that role in our lives. More
Prosthetic Bionics Give Danish Amputee the Power of Touch
New bionic technology is making it possible for amputees to feel again. It’s a scientific breakthrough, and Dennis Aabo Sørenson became the first in the world to experience it when he took a chance on a clinical trial that ended up paying off—big-time. Sørenson, from Denmark, had lost his left hand in a fireworks accident nine years earlier, when he decided to take part in the 2013 trial. The study’s groundbreaking technology connected surgically implanted electrodes to a bionic prosthetic hand, and after nearly a decade of living without touch sensory, Sørenson could feel again. More
Plans to Digitize Health Records Draw Skepticism
As the medical industry strives to integrate new technology to improve services and outcomes, venture capital funding for healthcare IT has tripled in the last three years, according to a story by WNYC's Mary Harris. Now, the federal government is preparing to pump $29 million into efforts to digitize healthcare records, with Obamacare ready to penalize providers who don't conform. But Ross Koppel, professor of sociology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has doubts about just how efficient and cost-effective the transition to digitized record-keeping will be. More
The Emerging Age of Techonomic Health: Self-tracking
Measuring ourselves with finer and finer detail is one of the rapidly-developing trends that suggests big changes afoot in how we will conceive of medical diagnosis and treatment. It should lead to more intelligent identification of what leads to various medical conditions, and throw much current medical research into a new light. In effect people will be able to begin to conduct p2p drug effectiveness tests, for one thing. This interesting article by Quentin Hardy in the New York Times touches on some of the implications. More
Why Drug Development is Failing – and How to Fix It
The information technology industry has been living by Moore’s Law ever since 1965, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore came up with the rule of thumb that the number of integrated circuits that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years. Contrast this with pharmaceuticals. In a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, a wholly different development trajectory was posited, named “Eroom’s Law” (Moore’s Law spelled backwards): the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. More
Mobile Health Apps Not So User-Friendly for Seniors
The rapid proliferation of mobile apps for health could hit a wall not usually associated with smart phones – they may be too hard to use by the patients that need them most. In a paper slated for presentation at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society annual meeting (Oct 22-25, Boston), researchers Laura A. Whitlock and Anne Collins McLaughlin of North Carolina State University warned that self-monitoring apps for diabetics are often not user-friendly for older patients. More
Should the FDA Regulate Medical Apps?
At the Consumer Electronics Show last January, the seventh most popular gadget in a popular vote was a wireless glucose meter for diabetics, Telcare BGM.The device reads the glucose level in a drop of blood on a test strip and wirelessly transmits the results to an online database. Telcare’s gadget is just one of a whole raft of mobile health monitoring devices that have come to market during the past year or two. They range from blood pressure cuffs, pulse readers and other types of glucose meters, but all have one thing in common: they must connect to a smart phone. More
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