Stamford, Connecticut-based Walker Health Labs launched an app this week, called foodtweeks, that focuses on tweaking a user's daily meals so that they eat healthier.
“Eight hundred million times a day in America, weight-conscious individuals ‘tweek’ their food by making small changes that remove unwanted calories,” foodtweeks founder Jay Walker, who previously founded Priceline and also owns ...
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...
Google's former Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger MD and Gilles Frydman, founder of the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR), announced the launch of Smart Patients, a new online community for cancer patients and caregivers, at the TEDMED event in Washington DC last week.
"What we are primarily trying to do is help cancer patients and caregivers learn more effectively from each other...
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 "...
Since late last year it has been something of an open secret in some digital health circles that Newton, Massachusetts-based sleep monitoring and coaching company Zeo was winding down its operations and searching for a buyer. At least one investor was making veiled references to the company running out of money during various question-and-answer periods at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC last...
Innovation almost by rule drives cost down in other industries, but not so much in healthcare. "Healthcare is unique in that every added feature increases the cost," Dr. Diego Miralles, head of Janssen Healthcare Innovation, part of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, said last week during a live TEDMED webcast.
One exception to that rule, however, is generic drugs,...
