The innovative mind behind Mozilla's Firefox design, Aza Raskin, has left Mozilla to found a new healthcare startup: "With health-care costs rising faster than inflation, a crisis is on the horizon. We need to apply cognitive psychology, the principles of design, and tighter feedback loops to our own health. Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. Massive Health, we think, can help make that happen," he wrote in his farewell blog. Raskin is widely touted as a user experience "genius." Healthcare could certainly use more of those. (Interestingly, Raskin's father is a noted human-computer interface expert, too. Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project for Apple back in the 1970s.) Blog
Consider ambient information for mHealth: "One way that ambient information changes behavior is simply by presenting individuals with key information at key moments. One example is for asthma sufferers; an air quality sensor alerts them to critical pollution levels and reminds them to take the recommended dose of medication; currently a high proportion of sufferers don’t even take the minimum dose. Another way is when individuals share health information (e.g. weight lost, calories consumed, distance walked) with a select group of contacts through social media. Individuals who see others’ updates and, in turn, share their own updates, create the sort of peer effect that makes face-to-face groups such as Weight Watchers so effective." EuroSCGLife
The ultimate quantified selfer: Nick Felton. Slate Video
Nuance expands its iPhone app: "With Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, Nuance is introducing a new level of clinical documentation flexibility by enabling mobile point-of-care dictation that is connected to speech-enabled transcription platforms, eScription and Dictaphone Enterprise Speech System, and the fully-outsourced Nuance Transcription Services offering." Release
Amcom Software updates its mobile offering: "The new version of Amcom Mobile Connect adds time-saving features and additional deployment options such as Wi-Fi coverage and BlackBerry Internet Service capabilities to ensure rapid and reliable message delivery. This is in addition to core functionality already in use by many hospitals, such as message encryption, delivery confirmations and full traceability for all messages sent and received." Release
How mobile money intersects with mobile health: "Kenya is the leading country in the world when it comes to mobile money. The world looks at Kenya as the model country which is having not only the greatest uptake in usage (today over 60 percent of Kenyan adults now use mPesa), but has the potential to change the economic development of the country in an unprecedented manner. New research from Billy Jack and Tuneet Suri indicates that it may be reducing the income irregularity and risk that the poor face daily. This indicates that mPesa, combined with the ability to create new savings accounts, could potentially provide a safety net for unexpected events, such as illness of family members." HealthUnbound
mHealth: When the doctor is on the phone. This piece profiles a half dozen high-profile organizations working on various mHealth pilots and platforms in developing markets. America.gov
Privacy issues are real in mobile health, case in point: "Mobistealth has just announced the launch of the most technologically advanced iPhone spy application ever developed. The Mobistealth iPhone application is the latest addition the professional grade monitoring software suite offered by the company. The application can be installed in minutes on any iPhone including 2G, 3G, 3GS, and iPhone 4 and runs completely in the background. Once installed, the application is virtually undetectable and the phone never needs to be touched again. All the setting can be adjusted anytime secretly from any Internet connection." Release
