Prediction markets have been used to predict everything from Oscar winning films and box office trends to the outcome of presidential elections, often with impressive accuracy. Now a new startup called CrowdMed aims to use a prediction market in healthcare. The Y Combinator-backed startup just raised $1.1 million in seed funding to use "the wisdom of crowds" to give diagnostic suggestions to...
When Larry Smarr started exploring the biochemistry of his body, he turned to his microbiome to find answers. At TEDMED 2013, Smarr talked about the steps he took in the months before he discovered he had Crohn’s disease.
At first, Smarr used apps like Zeo and Fitbit to monitor his sleeping and exercise respectively. Eventually, Smarr delved deeper, turning his attention to blood work and stool...
Left to right: Michael Weintraub, Giovanni Colello, Josh Stein, Nina Nashif, and Juan Enriquez.
The TEDMED organizers tried something new this year: they dedicated Thursday morning to some unscripted meetings of the minds about innovation in healthcare. The first discussion (which TEDMED maintained was not a panel) centered on the topic "From Start to Scale to Exit, the Trajectory of Innovation...
This image from TEDMED shows a closeup on an MIT student wearing an eyeMITRA prototype.
The MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture Group, led by Dr. Ramesh Raskar, has innovated the smartphone eye diagnostic space before. Their NETRA software for smartphone-enabled eye exams spun off into EyeNetra, which raised $1 million in first round funding last year. Prior to that, they developed CATRA, a cheap...
PatientsLikeMe Vice President for Advocacy Sally Okun spoke at TEDMED about the idea of building a "patient lexicon" to make it as easy for patients to talk about their conditions and compare notes as it is for doctors.
"As a pallative care nurse, much of my time was spent in the homes of patients. Sometimes it simply was about giving them the opportunity to say to me 'Is this normal?' 'Do other...
Deborah Estrin
One of the themes of this year's TEDMED conference was data liberation, kicked off by two speakers: Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at Cornell Tech and Amy Abernethy, a cancer researcher at Duke Clinical Research Center. Estrin and Abernethy each talked about a rich source of data that could revolutionize healthcare, but isn't currently being tapped; Estrin talked about the "...
