Jason Berek-Lewis Creator, Healthy Startups
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We’re all cyborgs now: our iPhones, iPads, Androids, Blackberrys are by our sides constantly. Our memories, exercise plans, social calendars, friendships, To Do lists, entertainment, reading, location discovery are all driven by apps on these devices. Many of us use our phones and tablets all day: for reading news, playing games, watching movies, keeping up with our social networks, tracking expenses and managing our professional contacts. Our increasing addiction to machine drugs is disrupting every element of our lives: we are becoming healthy cyborgs...
Apps empower healthy cyborgs
Healthy cyborgs are driven by apps. There are more than 6000 iOS health and fitness apps and it seems health care developers are sticking with Apple: it is difficult to find details about the total number of health apps in the Android Market.
Studies have shown that about 70% of health apps are targeted at consumers (figure from http://mobihealthnews.com) and the rest at health professionals. The ‘appification’ of health care is patient driven: there is clear interest in people playing a greater role in managing their health care and on a whole, western health systems are slowly moving towards models where patients take on greater responsibility for their own health.
This spark of personal responsibility is made possible because now we have the tools to drive our own health care: smart phone, tablet and web apps. About 35% of American adults use a smart phone and nine percent have downloaded a health app (figures from Pew). Here are some apps that help you manage your health:
Influtech is an Android/ iOS app that uses ‘crowdcasting’ to enable users to report on flu/cold activity near them. The app can also generate real-time maps that indicate where flu/cold activity is happening around the world. This app is so simple: using your finger you turn an onscreen ‘dial’ to indicate how sick you are with flu like symptoms. You can move the dial between “Low” and “High” to indicate the severity of your illness. All data is shared anonymously.
If you think there is no market for self reporting health apps that feed into a map/ graph tool, a survey conducted by Influtech found 87% of respondents are willing to share information using Influ or a similar app. This is provided that the information is shared anonymously and that the goal of information sharing is disease prevention and helping others.
The makers of the app have high expectations, their video ends with the declaration: “If everyone uses Influ epidemics become preventable”. It’s a lofty, and perhaps unattainable goal, but certainly one worth striving toward. For more about Influtech, read this post on Healthy Startups: http://healthystartups.com/startup-blog/2011/8/24/mobile-health-thoughts-from-a-mobile-health-startup.html
Cyborgs in our health system
Cyborgs are starting to appear in our health system: figures show that about 30% of USA-based physicians own an iPad, iPhone or iPod (figures from Manhatan Research). At its iOS 5 launch, Apple claimed 80% of USA hospitals are testing or piloting the use of the iPad on site. Doctors bringing their iOS devices into hospitals and medical centres is also a growing trend, one that is creating headaches for hospital IT departments across the world with security issues associated with data stored on iPads and many hospital IT systems not being compatible with iOS and Mac OS X Lion.
A quick browse through the iOS app store shows why i devices are so prominent in medicine. The store contains apps for writing prescriptions, accessing medical records, exploring anatomy, tracking medical data, accessing information about medications, etc. iOS more than any other portable or cloud based platform is empowering doctors to become health cyborgs too.
Once we reach the point where doctors and patients begin using apps in unison to manage health outcomes, the rise of the healthy cyborgs will be cemented.
Healthy cyborgs get social
True healthy cyborgs don’t exist independently of each other, they are social. Sickweather, a Baltimore, USA based startup asks “How do I avoid getting sick?”. The service collates an answer from streams of social data, aggregating mentions of key words into a visual representation of the spread of disease on online maps. Sickweather is now open for beta tester registration. For more about Sickweather, read this post on Healthy Startups: http://healthystartups.com/startup-blog/2011/7/3/sickweather-the-origin-of-a-health-startup.html
Healthy cyborgs, or should I say unhealthy cyborgs, are looking for social support as they work through their health challenges. People gather around common interests, that’s the whole point of social media: it allows us to do this on a global scale, and we are now organising ourselves around our health, wellness and illness interests.
What this means is the emergence of disease-specific social networks like those powered by Alliance Health Networks, a Salt Lake City based startup. A similar Australia-centric service called Healthshare is run out of Sydney. I believe these social networks will be viable as people may shy away from sharing intimate health information on sites like Facebook and Twitter where they usually share holiday snaps and interests like movies, sports, music, photography, etc. This schism will grow as people who live with sickness will use one type of social network to build support links with others who are sharing their journey and other social networks to ‘escape’ from their condition.
Doctors also gather in social networks of their own and this is fast becoming a way to share clinical knowledge and experience with colleagues from across the world. A recent study of 4000 USA-based physicians by QuantiaMD found that 28% of respondents used physician focused social networks for professional engagement.
The explosion of social networks like Facebook and Twitter mean it is possible that healthy cyborgs could bump into their doctor on social media. Kevin Pho, MD practices primary care in Nashua, New Hampshire and is also known as “social media’s leading physician voice”. In an article written nearly 2 years ago for USA Today Kevin Pho wrote: “But like a lot of the information on the internet, not all medical content is credible. In fact, acting on inaccurate web information can be dangerous. That’s where medical professionals can help patients interpret and decipher what is accurate on the web. And with 57 million Americans reading blogs, combined with 120 million monthly U.S. visitors to Facebook and Twitter, social media presents a compelling opportunity for doctors to better interact with patients.”
While medical organisations and regulatory bodies are busy writing guidelines, manuals and codes of conduct to regulate physician/ patient interaction online, patients and doctors are already talking! Unlike the traditional geographically based patient/ doctor relationship, social media and social technologies now mean that we can talk to doctors all around the world, just as I did early this year when I tweeted a link to a blog post that mentioned my heart condition. I ended up in a short conversation with a USA-based cardiologist. We talked about my heart condition, the operations I had and the medications I take and... that was it. The conversation and the connection was short, but we still had the opportunity to reach out and share with each other, something that could never have happened without Twitter/ social media. This interaction was only made possible by the rise of healthy cyborgs.
Cyborgs want to play (healthy) Angry Birds
Healthy cyborgs want peer support, but they also want to engage by other means, including playing games. If you are interested in tech, startups and apps you will have heard the term ‘gamification’ which refers to “the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences” (via Wikipedia) .
Services like Wellthy, a social wellness game that makes it fun and easy for companies to promote healthy habits among their workforce, reward people for healthy behaviour through providing badges, points and other metrics to track your progress against the crowd or against others in your social circle. For more about Wellthy, read this post on Healthy Startups: http://healthystartups.com/startup-blog/2011/9/26/wellthy-app-makes-getting-healthy-fun.html
Other services like Munch-5-A-Day encourage users to set goals around how much healthy food they will eat in a day and reward healthy eating with badges and graphs of your progress and healthy habits that can be shared over social media: encouraging others in your social circles to use the app and eat a healthy diet.
Healthy Cyborgs know that keeping healthy can also be fun.
Here comes SkyNet health
Maybe we are some way away from creating a health-based artificial intelligence? Maybe not. IBM is working on Watson, an artificial intelligence system for data analytics. One of Watson’s eventual applications will be “the effective and efficient storage, retrieval analysis and use of bio-medical information to improve health”.
Watson is just one piece of the ultimate healthy cyborg puzzle. When you create networks that combine Watson’s computing power with social data on health (from Sickweather for example) and add RunKeeper’s ambition to create “a system that can identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more”, that has the sole purpose of delivering an “ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user’s own historical health and fitness data”.” (via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/runkeeper-adds-new-integration-to-its-health-graph-in-hopes-of-building-the-facebook-of-fitness) we are well on the way to building a health graph that can drive innovation and improvements in technologies, care, practice and patient health outcomes.
What we are really creating with these new health apps, social networks, games and the holistic health graph is the ultimate ‘self aware’ and ‘self informed’ healthcare tool that can help us beat disease, crunch petabites of data, discover new technologies, empower patients and ultimately provide an entirely new platform for patient/ physician collaboration that can help to provide medical care over whole continents, and even on the other side of the world.
When healthy cyborgs are well and when they are sick the health graph can ultimately serve as a tool that better guides strategies for prevention, care/ treatment and cure. The health graph can give us real time global views of disease patterns, of health-oriented discussions and of health behaviours. The health graph can deliver an unending bounty of data - all we have to do is decide how to use it for the benefit of healthy cyborgs everywhere.
Monday, December 31, 2012 at 2:45PM 
