Scienceroll.com: Weekly Introduction January 31, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine.add a comment
I would like to share my favourite and ongoing projects with you so I can give you a proper introduction to Scienceroll.com. You can also find me on Twitter or on Friendfeed.
For news and articles about the impact of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare, please follow the Medicine 2.0 Friendfood room.
For news and articles about personalized medicine and genetics, please follow the Gene Genie Friendfeed room.
Medicine 2.0 University Course: This is the third semester of the first university course that focuses on web 2.0 and medicine for medical students. Now, almost 100 students attend the 20 slideshows through 10 weeks and they fill a survey out before and after the course.
Medicine 2.0 Collection: I maintain the biggest collection of links and posts focusing on web 2.0 and medicine.
Webicina.com is my service that aims to help medical professionals and patients enter the web 2.0 era by providing them with e-courses, consulting and personalized packages.
PeRSSonalized Medicine is a free tool that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place. You can create your own “medical journal” and as we are totally open to suggestions, let us add the journals, blogs and websites that you would like to follow.
Scienceroll Search is a personalized medical search engine powered by PolyMeta search and clustering engine. You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list. It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.
List of biomedical and scientific community sites: More than 30 communities with links, descriptions and screenshots.
List of Biomedical video sites: Almost 40 sites featuring scientific or medical videos and videocasts.
Apple iPad in Healthcare: Pros and Cons January 31, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health 2.0, Innovation, Invention, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Mobile.65 comments
I’m not really an Apple fan, but I’m always open to innovations in healthcare. Last week was centered around iPad both in the news and the blogosphere as more and more bloggers started to describe its potential role in healthcare. It’s obvious now that healthcare will go through some major changes in the next few years due to EMRs (electronic medical records) and PHRs (personal health records). Though Boston has already gone through this.
Tablet solutions have a clear future (pdf) but as Apple tablet representatives were spotted at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a few weeks ago, it seems iPad might have a shot in healthcare as well. Let’s see what can happen.
Possible cons from the healthcare aspect:
- No camera: it means it cannot be used in telemedicine
- No flash: several medical websites use Flash
- No mouse support: it’s not a disadvantage if there won’t be click-heavy applications
- Battery life: It is somewhere around 10 hours which is enough for a doctor working on the hospital but what happens when the iPad gets handed off to the next person? Dying battery can be swapped out for a fresh one in other tablet solutions. Here there won’t be enough time to re-charge iPads.
- It’s too big to fit into a doctor’s pocket.
- iPad is not ruggedized while other healthcare tablets are drop resistant from about a meter.
- No Multi-tasking: it makes it impossible to write a patient report while consulting with a collegue (there are hundreds of examples why multi-tasking is crucial)
- No barcode scanner: it’s used for checking and uploading drugs, among others.
- Such a device should be water-proof and easily disinfected. iPad wasn’t designed for this.
- The iPad has a capacitive touch screen on which gloves won’t work.
Possible pros:
- If there is a company that can get the best out of such a device, that is Apple.
- Probably there will be more and more medical applications designed exclusively for iPad just like there are so many medical apps for iPhone.
- It’s cheaper than other healthcare tablets.
- It was designed to be as user-friendly as possible (a nice advantage of Apple products) so elderly people will also be able to learn to use it easily.
- One scenario might be having an iPad in the hospital as the central database where doctors can upload the information from the iPhones.
If I miss anything, please let me know so I can improve the list.
I think iPad has the potential to become the No.1 healthcare tablet, but it has to go through plenty of changes and innovations in order to become a serious competitor in this race.
Resources:
- MobileHealthNews
- Kevin, MD one and two
- Read Write Web
- Lucien Engelen
Autism and MMR Vaccines: Finally an answer January 30, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, science.3 comments
You may have heard about Andrew Wakefield who tried to find a link between MMR vaccines and autism. He has published several papers. Now it turns out he acted unethically in carrying out his research according to a medical regulator.
Doctor Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study, published in the Lancet medical journal, said there might be a connection between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) injection and autism.
The suggestion horrified parents and led to a slump in the number of youngsters getting the jab, as well as triggering heated debate in medical circles.
In a ruling Thursday, the General Medical Council attacked Wakefield for “unethical” research methods and for showing a “callous disregard” for the youngsters as he carried out tests.
This included taking blood samples from children at his son’s birthday party for five-pound payments.
Why am I writing about it?
Because we all have to learn from this. Not just other scientists who act unethically, but also the media that transmitted this story without checking the facts and laypople who believed in what the media had to say. We all have to learn from this. Science must become more transparent. There is no question about it.
Detailed analysis and report on the Respectful Insolence.
Death in the Digital Age? January 30, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0.1 comment so far
Have you ever wondered what happens with your online appearances if you die? What will happen to my blog? Or Twitter account? Will anyone tell my contacts on Facebook what happened to me? Quite strange questions. There will be a one-day seminar on ‘Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age’ at the National University of Singapore on 17 April that will cover this “interesting” issue.
How is the dash between life and death, being and oblivion reflected in the age of digital media? How can we approach the subtleties of different cultural practices and beliefs through design? What is the technological response to the ephemerality of our digital and physical existence?
How can we respond to the ever-increasing mass of digital refuse or ‘dead’ data and what are the implications of and insights provided by reflecting on the inevitable end of ‘civilisation’? What are the legal and ethical implications of ‘freedom of choice’ being supported through technology, digital desecration and the hybridisation of (the remains of) the dead with the living?
Keywords include:
- possible immortality and afterlife through digital media
- cultural issues with dying, death, afterlife and technology
- new forms of grieving and commemorating via emerging technologies
- the motivation, role and function of technological responses to mortality
- digital archiving and the preservation of self and society
- the ethics of supporting death and desecration through technology
- the hybridisation of once living, sentient beings with other biological and robotic entities.
(Via Biomedicine on Display)
Dermatology and Web 2.0: Selected Online Resources January 29, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, PeRSSonalized Medicine, Web 2.0, Webicina.3 comments
Webicina, the first medical web 2.0 guidance service, published today Dermatology and Web 2.0, a free comprehensive resource containing all the web 2.0 tools from quality blogs and communities to online slideshows and mobile applications. It was designed to help medical professionals interested in dermatology find the best resources online.
Please take a look at the table of contents:
- News and Information on Dermatology
- Dermatology in the Blogosphere
- Deramtology Podcasts and Intrerviews
- Dermatology Community Sites, FaceBook Groups and Forums
- Microblogging: Twitter and Friendfeed
- Dermatology Wikis
- Dermatology videos, animations and videocasts
- Mobile Applications
- Social Bookmarking
- Medical Search Engines
- Trend Trackers
- Clinical Cases and Images in Dermatology
- Slideshows about Dermatology
PeRSSonalized Dermatology is an easy-to-use, free aggregator of quality medical information that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles about dermatology in one personalized place.
Some reasons why PeRSSonalized Medicine is unique:
- You can search in the database. It means you will find medical information only from a quality selected portion of the world wide web.
- You can personalize any of the sections.
- You can also receive the newest Pubmed articles focusing on your search term. Just insert your field of interest, a therapy, a condition, etc. and click Search. Then you can add the newly created box to your personalized medical “journal”.
- It’s meant to be a community-based project so we are open to suggestions. Please let us know which quality resources should be added to the database.
Covering Scientific Conferences Online January 29, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Conference, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Web 2.0.add a comment
Through Webicina.com, I’ve covered many conferences online such as the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality or the World Congress of Gerontology. Though, covering scientific conferences online needs some guidelines. Here are two recent articles focusing on this issue.
Those of us who spent a large proportion of our time live blogging were asked to write a paper about our experiences. This quickly became two papers, as there were two clear subjects on our minds: firstly, how the live blogging went in the context of ISMB 2009 specifically; and secondly, how our experiences (and that of the organisers) might form the basis of a set of guidelines to conference organisers trying to create live blogging policies.
While traditional publishing-house journalism has broadly remained unchanged, many scientists are now publishing their notes on the Internet, accelerating the spread of information to interested audiences. With the increasing popularity of live blogging, conference organizers need to consider how such techniques relate to existing policies. While publication of information at some level is a primary goal of all conferences, there are diverse technological, political, and social factors associated with live blogging that organizers should consider.
Academic Search Engine Optimization in Google Scholar January 28, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Google, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Web 2.0.14 comments
Search engine optimization (SEO) has a golden age in this internet era, but to use it in academic research, it sounds quite strange for me. After reading this publication (pdf) focusing on this issue, my opinion changed. Actually I think many researchers have been structuring their papers based on this concept for years.
This article introduces and discusses the concept of academic search engine optimization (ASEO). Based on three recently conducted studies, guidelines are provided on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines in general and for Google Scholar in particular. In addition, we briefly discuss the risk of researchers’ illegitimately ‘over-optimizing’ their articles.
Discussion:
ASEO should not be seen as a guide on how to cheat academic search engines. Rather, it is about helping academic search engines to understand the content of research papers and, thus, about how to make this content more widely and easily available. Certainly, we can anticipate that some researchers will try to boost their rankings in illegitimate ways. However, the same problem exists in regular Web searching; and eventually Web search engines manage to avoid spam with considerable success, and so will academic search engines. In the long term, ASEO will be beneficial for all – authors, search engines, and users of search engines. Therefore, we believe that academic search engine optimization (ASEO) should be a common procedure for researchers, similar to, for instance, selecting an appropriate journal for publication.
