300 Longwood Ave, Boston MA 02115
617-355-6000
Want to hack something in medicine? Vendors are increasingly eager to contribute their tools to problem-solving teams, like those who will gather November 14 for Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hacking Pediatrics. Seeing an array of tools presented at a showcase at Boston Children’s last week, I felt excited about the possibilities ahead.
Here are a few tools that can help innovators improve health care for patients, caregivers and providers. …
Rett syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting mostly girls, takes away the ability to speak, and this makes the condition hard to reliably measure and assess. But children with Rett syndrome also display distinctive hand movements or stereotypies, including hand wringing, clasping and other repetitive hand movements, visible in many of these videos. With help from a grant from Boston Children’s Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program, researchers are transforming these hand movements into an assessment tool.
Until now, there has been no quantitative measure for monitoring Rett hand movements. Adapting commercially available wearable sensor technology, biomedical engineering researcher Heather O’Leary has created a bracelet-like device not unlike Fitbit, another wearable accelerometer used to monitor exercise activity levels. …
A Bluetooth pacifier that takes a baby’s temperature. An iPhone otoscope. A smart yoga mat. And health & fitness trackers out the wazoo. That’s just a small sampling of the health-related technologies showcased at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (or CES).
The Las Vegas-based annual trade fair, a weeklong playdate for gadgetphiles, largely focuses on TVs, computers, cameras, entertainment and mobile gear. This year it also had a robust health and biotech presence, with more than 300 health and biotech exhibitors.
“I witnessed literally hundreds of companies all vying for the wrists and attention of users,” Michael Docktor, MD, Boston Children’s Hospital’s clinical director of innovation and director of clinical mobile solutions, wrote on BetaBoston. “For me, it was a chance to see where medicine and health care are headed.” …
As Epilepsy Awareness month closes out and we embark upon the holiday season, we’re pleased to see an innovation initiated here at Boston Children’s Hospital move toward commercial development. This wearable device for patients with epilepsy, called Embrace, is like a “smoke alarm” for unwitnessed seizures that may potentially prevent tragic cases of sudden, unexpected death from epilepsy (SUDEP) in the future.
The Bluetooth-enabled, sensor-loaded wristband, using technology developed and tested in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, can detect the onset of a convulsive seizure based on the wearer’s movements and autonomic nervous system activity. …
Fitbit, Jawbone, Nike, Withings…a lot of companies are already in the wearable/mobile health technology and data tracking game. But a couple of really big players are stepping on to the court.
At their most recent Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced both an app and a framework—Health and HealthKit—that will tie in with various wearable technologies and health apps. HealthKit will also feed data into electronic medical record (EMR) systems like Epic, which runs at some of the largest hospitals in the country. And rumors abound that an upcoming Apple smartwatch (iWatch? iTime? Only Tim Cook knows right now) will carry a host of sensors for tracking activity and health data.
Google also wants to get into the game with a health data framework called Fit that they announced at their I/O conference in June. Unlike Apple, its strategy seems more focused on providing a standard way for trackers, devices and apps from different manufacturers to talk to Android Wear devices.
What will entry of these big players mean? We asked Michael Docktor, MD, clinical director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program. …
Geoffrey Horwitz, PhD, is a business development associate in the Technology and Innovation Development Office (TIDO) at Boston Children’s Hospital. Follow him on Twitter @GeoffHorwitz
At the recent 2014 Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) International Convention, the message was clear: Digital health is the new blockbuster. For the first time ever, BIO spotlighted digital health, with a specific focus on how digital health is influencing the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Also featured was a digital health zone where companies and other exhibitors from all over the world could demo their products and services to thousands of attendees.
In pharmaceutical lingo, a blockbuster is a drug that generates revenues of at least $1 billion. Digital health certainly fits this definition. By 2018, reports suggest that revenues will exceed $6 billion for wearable wireless devices alone. A recent McKinsey study found that 75 percent of consumers surveyed, of various ages and located throughout the world, would like to use digital health devices. …
Projections that the global mobile health market will boom to nearly $50 billion have ignited interest among innovators. A pair of physician innovators from Boston Children’s Hospital peg wearables as the technology to watch and offer a sneak peek at what adoption might mean, while others ask about the pediatric market for wearables and point to a few potential stumbling blocks. Read on for their views. …
Judy Wang, MS, is a program manager in the Telehealth Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. She is currently serving on the Mayor’s ONEin3 Council, which works on projects dedicated to maximizing the positive impact that young people have on the City of Boston.
If you Google the term “millennials,” you’ll see that Google automatically fills in such search terms as “millennials lazy,” “millennials spoiled,” “millennials trophy kids” and “millennials entitled.” Ouch.
As part of the Mayor’s ONEin3 Council and a Founding Hacker for MIT’s H@cking Medicine, I could not disagree more with this assessment of my generation. I’ve observed young people increasingly drawn to civically minded work with public impact—including work in health tech. …