Two medical research organizations have kicked off new efforts this week that seek to use consumer-health wearables to identify or event predict the onset of disease.
The first is the DETECT (Digital Engagement & Tracking for Early Control & Treatment) Study, headed by the Scripps Research Translational Institute. It combines heart-rate, activity and sleep data collected through a range...
Digital chronic disease management company Livongo Health announced a partnership today with VSP Vision Care that will blend each service for the companies’ mutual clients. More specifically, Livongo members with diabetes who are also under “most” VSP plans will be offered retinal screenings from VSP network doctors, and receive messages through the digital program prompting them to seek eye care...
This week has spurred some major patent announcements from digital health companies Akili Interactive and Sonde Health, which are both affiliated with PureTech Health, a cross disciplinary biopharma company. The two companies announced they have been granted the rights to multiple international digital health patents. Akili revealed they are developing a technology aimed at using neural...
San Francisco-based digital health coaching startup Vida Health has demonstrated in the past that it’s effective at helping people lose weight, but The Journal of Internet Medicine recently published a study from the University of California San Francisco that quantifies this efficacy.
Almost 29 percent of participants lost an average of 9.5 percent of their body weight; 86 percent of those with...
Older, low-income women prefer to use digital health tools to a paper questionnaire when entering health data, according to a small study of 15 English and Spanish speaking women conducted by researchers from the University of California San Francisco.
The women in the trial used an iPad app developed by five University of California medical centers, called Athena Breast Health Network. The app ...
Berkeley, California-based smartphone-enabled stethoscope company Eko Devices has raised $2 million in a round led by existing investor Founder.org with participation from Stanford StartX, and angels, including former HHS advisor John Noonan and the cofounders of music identification company Shazam. This brings the company's total funding to date to $2.8 million.
Eko's device, called Core, hooks...
Researchers from Northwestern University have launched a study that will analyze how monitoring the physical activity of patients who underwent spine surgery, using Fitbit activity trackers, could help them predict the patient's recovery time.
Mayo Clinic published results of a similar study that used Fitbit devices to track recovery time of cardiac patients back in 2013.
Northwestern is ...
Samsung Electronics announced a partnership with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) last week to "accelerate validation and commercialization of promising new sensors, algorithms, and digital health technologies" that will be used in preventive health offerings. The new lab will be called the UCSF-Samsung Digital Health Innovation Lab.
Technologies that will be brought to the lab...
Boston-based Akili Interactive Labs partnered with Pfizer to conduct a study of Akili's iOS-based game, Project Evo, in the hopes of using the game to detect indications of Alzheimer's in healthy individuals.
The month-long study of 100 participants includes a mix of some who have risk markers of potentially developing Alzheimer's and some who do not. All participants will take the game home and...
When the news first broke back in March of the Health eHeart Study, a University of California in San Francisco study leveraging mobile health apps and connected consumer medical devices in an effort to track and monitor 1 million people in real-time, MobiHealthNews identified several of the devices being used in the study from publicity materials. One of those companies, San Francisco-based...
