Health 2.0 News: Centrifuge for Labor and Behind Healthcare.gov August 11, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Genetic testing, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Statistics, Visualization, Web 2.0, What's on the web?, Wikipedia.add a comment
- Measuring Hospital Quality: The data presented is from The Joint Commission’s 2009 Annual Report on Quality and Safety
- Centrifuge for Helping Women in Labor: An unbelievable patent
At the moment the sensitivity and specificity of a lot of genetic tests for complex, polygenic disorders (for which we haven’t yet identified all the genetic variants that increase risk) are unlikely to match those of standard diagnostic or screening tests. What’s likely is that the predictive capacity of these tests will improve as more variants are identified, and/or if additional non-genetic information is included in the test.
- Statistical analysis is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for people who love stats. It’s 100% free, no registration required.
The 2010 Social Networking Map: Travel tips? August 10, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Visualization, Web 2.0.2 comments
I use the old social media map in my course in order to show students what the whole web looks like, but I was eagerly waiting for the update. Now here it is.
Regarding travel tips, you should visit the Drunk Pictures Mountain Range in Facebook country, the Bay of Tags, the LOLcat island but never visit the Island of Trolls.
Do you collect data about yourself? August 6, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Data, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Visualization, Web 2.0.5 comments
I’ve written about the Quantified Self project plenty of times (group of empowered patients trying to live a healthy life via data collection and analysis), and now over at FlowingData blog, there is a great discussion about collecting data about ourselves. Author, Nathan Yau shared how data collection can become fun and a vital part of our lives.
On your.flowingdata.com, you can collect your life data through a few simple steps on Twitter. One data point per tweet!
- Step 1. Follow @yfd on Twitter
- Step 2. Sign in to your.flowingdata with Twitter
- Step 3. Start recording data (via direct messages) following a few simple guidelines
Without using data analytics softwares and sites, it’s still easy to collect your blood sugar or blood pressure levels. FlowingData lets you visualize and analyze data as well.
The Future of Medical Imaging August 2, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health, Innovation, Invention, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Virtuality, Visualization.1 comment so far
Have you every wondered what happens if you combine a 3D TV with virtual reality in medical imaging? Well, the device described in the video was developed by the University of California, San Diego and costs around $10,000. CoolestGadgets commented on this:
HUVR “couples a consumer 3D HDTV panel with a half-silvered mirror to project any graphic image onto the user’s hands and/or into the space surrounding them”. Apparently, the user’s head is tracked in order to get the correct perspective, and there is a haptic feedback device on hand for manipulation. I noticed that their haptic device looks a lot like a Novint Falcon, which I believe was designed for 3D gaming.
And as a second step, if you think it will lead to even more complicated interfaces, well, see what Hitachi developed, a gesture-based interface:
Twitter Maps Emotional State of the USA July 27, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, twitter, Video, Visualization, Web 2.0.2 comments
Recently, I mentioned a software that detects depression in text without obvious terms like “depression” or “suicide”. It seems mapping the mental health or emotional status of the online world is becoming a reality and here is a new evidence for that. The New Scientist reported a study in which scientists used the positive and negative words of Twitter messages in order to map the country’s emotional state:
To glean mood from the 140-character-long messages, the researchers analysed all public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009. They filtered them to find tweets that contain words included in a psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words – a low-scoring word on ANEW is considered negative, a high-scoring one positive. They also filtered out tweets from users outside the US, and also from those in the US who did not include their exact location – for example, their city – in their Twitter profile.
That left 300 million tweets, each of which was awarded a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. For example, “diamond”, “love” and “paradise” indicate happiness, whereas “funeral”, “rape” and “suicide” are negative. “Dentist” is fairly neutral.
Where Do You Go? July 7, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Video, Visualization, Web 2.0.add a comment
If you combine Google Maps, the FourSquare API and the GHeat heat mapping library, you get Where do you go, an application that visualizes wherever you go. Steven Lehrburger explains it like that:
Where Do You Go provides Foursquare users with a dynamic heat map of the places they have visited on top of a standard Google Maps interface. Users can create snapshots of their maps and hotlink them as static URLs on their personal webpages, or they can use the simple WDYG wrapper pages to share their maps on Twitter. The maps will self-update automatically in the background as users continue to visit new places and checkin with Foursquare.
And does the same on video:
How Much are My Organs Worth? June 22, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Art, Health, Infographics, Medicine, Visualization.7 comments
I mean I don’t plan to sell my organs on E-Bay, but as organ transplantation (lack of donors) and illegal organ trafficking are getting more and more serious, this infographics just came in time. It will give you some interesting answers like how much does a liver cost in South Korea or how many patients are waiting for transplants. Click on the image for the original version:
The Future of Data June 8, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Computer, Data, eHealth, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Visualization.7 comments
FlowingData, one of my favourite blogs, just featured an entry focusing on how data will be organized in the future.
If there’s anything uniform across all the ideas, it’s ubiquity. In the future, computers won’t feel like computers, and data will not just flow alongside the physical world. Instead, data will intertwine with your day-to-day like threads in a fabric.
They come up with many examples, but I liked this one below the most. Imagine a totally transparent healthcare system in which you see all the relevant data about doctors, procedures, hospitals (success rates, costs), etc. You can really make a wise decision because you will know all the details and data you need.
Microsoft envisioned what 2019 would look like:
And here is a great talk from Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler who presents g-speak – the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface.
Health 2.0 News: iPad, I-Patients, Wii and computer viruses June 2, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in e-patient, Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Surgery, Video, Virtuality, Visualization, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.add a comment
- E-Patients & I-Patients?: A nice overview about the definition of empowered patients or e-patients.
- WebMD iPad App Is A Hypochondriac’s Nightmare (Gizmodo): They conclude that it’s even easier to navigate in the iPad application than on the regular WebMD website.
- Wii can do better (Spoonful of Medicine): The potential benefits of using Nintendo Wii in health management and medicine/rehabilitation.
“Our research shows that implantable technology has developed to the point where implants are capable of communicating, storing and manipulating data,” he said. “They are essentially mini computers. This means that, like mainstream computers, they can be infected by viruses and the technology will need to keep pace with this so that implants, including medical devices, can be safely used in the future.”
- Ten Years of PubMed Central: a Good Thing that’s Only Going to Get Better: It’s interesting to see the major differences and the directions Pubmed is being developed in.
Health Infographs on Flickr June 2, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Infographics, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Visualization, Web 2.0.17 comments
Juhan Sonin found some great ways to visualize his health and also share this kind of data. I guess the Quantified Self project would love it. His words (and the second example):
This chart isn’t a see it + know it (at first encounter). You have to live with it for a while to recognize the patterns. While it’s not quite there yet, there is some goodness here. Some metrics you want low, some you want high… and that’s fine for these charts when you use them over time.
Then you’ll have recognizable patterns to overlay on your graph, like diabetes, and you’ll see whether your profile measures up to a typical diabetic profile…
