Google Flu Trends, as a website open to the general public, has shut down. The Google Flu Trends team will continue to track flu patterns based on search history, but it will now provide that data directly to public health researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Influenza Division....
Without specifically acknowledging criticisms about its accuracy, Google announced Friday it would be making some changes to Google Flu Trends, the service that uses search data to track and predict flu outcomes in the United States and around the world. Specifically, Flu Trends will stop relying solely on search data to make predictions but will begin to combine that search data, continually,...
Many people know that Google Flu Trends massively inaccurately predicted the number of flu cases at the end of 2012, as first reported by Nature Magazine's Decan Butler. A group of Northeastern University professors just published a pair of papers, however, that suggest the problems with Flu Trends are much more wide-reaching and systemic than a single glitch -- and they believe there's a lesson...
Johns Hopkins National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER) has launched two new web apps and updated a third to help hospital first responders and hospital planners prepare for emergency situations.
The two new apps are Flucast and Surge. Johns Hopkins made the third, EMCAPS, a downloadable program meant for first-responder training and hospital disaster...
Google made big news recently when it announced Google Calico, a new venture that would apply "some longer term, moonshot thinking around healthcare and biotechnology," putting the minds at Google toward the problems of aging and illness.
Calico is far from Google's first venture into health or wellness, however. The company's (ultimately failed) PHR venture Google Health was one high profile...
