One of the more interesting products resulting from the partnership is the integration of Healthline’s 3D BodyMaps, a visual search offering that lets users browse the human body to see how diseases and other medical conditions can affect it. The launch is timely, given Google’s recent announcement that it would shut down its own Google Body Browser project, which will be closed and the code open-sourced.

Sharecare will also roll out additional content, navigation features and applications in over the next few months, including Healthline’s SymptomSearch, TreatmentSearch and DrugSearch

In case you’re unfamiliar with Sharecare, the site is a social counterpart to the older WebMD, both of which were founded (or co-founded) by Jeff Arnold. It’s probably what WebMD would be, if launched today…-

Read the whole story at Techcrunch

So to explore the future of fitness, we need to know how technology will impact our health. According to famed futurist Ray Kurzweil, within this century we will have blood-cell-sized nanobots, swimming through our bloodstreams keeping us healthy by zapping cancer, correcting DNA errors, removing toxins, extending our memories and eating up brownies before they hit our thighs. And we’ll have chips in our bodies that will transmit our personal health data to and from devices and our brain. Read the whole blogpost by Courtney Boyd Myers and related at http://thenextweb.com/

I visited the Artefact office in Seattle last month and was shown the prototype at work on an iPad. The app, as yet unnamed, is designed to help doctors, administrators and patients manage patient care in a hospital. The colorful and eminently usable design is – I can only hope – a pointer to the hospital and doctor apps of the near future.

What most impressed me about the app was that it didn’t resemble the clunky, boxy, database-looking apps I’d seen in the past at hospitals and doctor clinics. This prototype was intuitive and had a clean, functional design. What’s more, it appeared to revolve more around the patient than the hospital system.

A picture can tell a thousand words. The image directly below is of the prototype hospital app from Artefact. Below that is a traditional hospital app.

A healthy, attractive app!

An unhealthy hospital app that should be euthanized.

The Artefact app has a dashboard for each patient, showing who the care group is and a chart of that patient’s vital signs. Interactive infographics help caregivers understand the patient’s health data. The app employs modern web design features. For example there is a rating for each patient, fed by real-time data. Colored up and down arrows display whether the patient’s health is trending up or down.

It’s a relatively simple feature, similar to ratings used in hundreds of ‘web 2.0′ sites over the past 5-6 years. But simplicity is exactly what’s needed in hospital apps, which have traditionally been bloated and overly complex. With this prototype app, a doctor or nurse can check the overall status of a patient in one glance. He or she can of course also drill down to the actual data points and check the patient’s history.

Taking a cue from the world of social gaming, there is an end goal for the app. The target for each patient is discharge – that is, going home. To help the doctor track the patient’s well being, the app has an “estimated discharge” task based system.

The Artefact app is designed to be a decision making tool, while also allowing the sharing of information among hospital staff (such as reports).

The above screenshots show an iPad app, but like any good modern web app it will cross different devices. According to Artefact, while doctors will probably use tablets at the patient’s bedside, unit coordinators may use their desktop PCs to see the status of patients and make plans for them.

Anything that simplifies hospital care and removes the need for complex medical apps is a great advance forward in health technology. Let’s hope this is indeed the future of hospital apps.

Original article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_hospital_apps.php

Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity.

So city engineers decided to take another approach. In five Garden Grove school zones, they put up what are known as dynamic speed displays, or driver feedback signs: a speed limit posting coupled with a radar sensor attached to a huge digital readout announcing “Your Speed.”” Read more at wired.com

“I’d argue there’s a significant opportunity for a platform focused relentlessly (think Jeff Bezos) on the patient, providing patients with significant value and benefits from engagement that are both immediate and accretive.”

och massa andra bra citat. (fick denna av Billing)
read more at blogs.forbes.com