Renowned cardiologist Dr. Heather Ross has teamed up with Apple to carry out a clinical study to see whether the Apple Watch could be used to predict worsening heart failure.
As part of the study, data that is collected using the Apple Watch’s sensors — including the Blood Oxygen app and mobility features — will be compared to the data that’s gathered by doctors using physical examinations. If it’s accurate, this could turn to be another exciting advance for the Apple Watch and its users.
Amazon has a secret team working on new health technology that could go head to head with Apple’s.
The retail giant is said to be working on electronic medical records, telemedicine, and new health apps for devices like the Amazon Echo.
Austin-based research group Brains Worldwide Foundation is developing a new iPad app to help parents carry out concussion tests on their kids at home, if they fear their children might have suffered a brain trauma during a sports game or similar.
Apple today announced it is expanding its ResearchKit health platform to include new studies on autism, epilepsy and melanoma.
Apple will work with leading universities and research centers including Duke University, John Hopkins, and Oregon Health & Science University.
“We’re honored to work with world-class medical institutions and provide them with tools to better understand diseases and ultimately help people lead healthier lives,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations.
From the health-tracking features of the Apple Watch to iPhone cases capable of predicting strokes, there are more and more medical devices involving Apple products.
Perhaps the most amazing so far, however, involves a newly-launched medical technology which allows chronic pain patients to use their iPod Touch to interrupt the pain signals travelling up their spinal cord on their way to the brain.
A year and a half ago, Bob Shor’s diabetic dad asked him if he had seen his dad take his insulin. Bob’s answer, “No, I didn’t see you take your meds” was interpreted by his father as “No, you haven’t taken them.” His dad overdosed that day, which Bob says was the reason he and his brother Rotem created MediSafe, a collaborative app that helps keep track of long-term medication.
The app will remind users when it’s time to take meds, and display dosage and an image of what the meds actually look like. There’s even a refill reminder and personalized information and details about taking the drug and effects. But the big feature is the app’s collaborative nature.
Do you know what a hookworm is? It’s a filthy parasite which hides in your intestine, secured by a its hooks, and feeds on your blood. Ugh. They affect around 600 million people in the world, and can’t be detected with the human eye. Why the hell am I telling your about this in the Cult of Mac? Because an enterprising Canadian doctor has hacked his iPhone to diagnose the presence of these filthy animals.
At the opening of this year’s NFL season, we looked at how the iPad has become a popular training tool among many NFL teams. With the season over and the Super Bowl just days away, many players, coaches, and fans are already looking ahead towards the NFL draft in the spring and next season.
Next season, Apple’s tablet will be an even bigger part io the NFL and it may even revolutionize parts of the organization and even the sport of football itself. Here’s how.
The success of devices like the iPhone and iPad in healthcare has become so pronounced that the Department of Health And Human Services has begun to single-out the use mobile devices as part of the meaningful use requirements for electronic health records (EHR) systems. In addition to identifying mobile device use, the agency has also taken steps towards explicitly regulating mobile device security needs in the healthcare industry.
What do you do if you’re a medical technology startup while waiting for the FDA to approve your flagship iPhone-based product?
If you’re AliveCor, you launch a veterinary version of it.
The product in question is AliveCor’s iPhone ECG heart monitor, which the company showed off nearly two years ago, at the CES in 2011. The device allows a medical professional to assess a patient’s heart rhythm, providing more data than a stethoscope or manual check of their pulse. Although the device has broad potential, it has yet to be approved by the FDA.
The iPhone is the most popular device among medical professionals, followed by the iPad and then Android smartphones. That’s one of the key findings in a new study that examines the relationship between electronic health records (EHR) systems, mobile technology, and how doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers use both mobile devices and EHR systems.
One of the biggest points of the survey, however, is that the vast majority of U.S. healthcare providers do not use a mobile device to access electronic records. In fact only about in one in twenty (6%) use a mobile device to access electronic records or prescribe medications using an electronic prescribing system. That’s despite the fact that almost three-quarters (72%) of providers report using mobile technology as part of their practice.
We talk about the iPad’s role in healthcare pretty regularly. Many physicians and health care practices have found innovative ways to integrate the iPad into daily patient interactions. According to a new study, the pharmaceutical industry has discovered that the iPad is an excellent tool for promoting new medications and that it can influence the prescribing habits of doctors.
The iPad has become a fixture in health care that simplifies the lives of doctors and nurses. It turns out that the iPad can improve the quality of care patients receive if it is used as a mechanism to record a patient’s medical history and/or as a way of monitoring that patient’s progress on follow-up visits.
Health related iOS apps are proliferating quickly in the App Store. While the most popular health related apps tend to be focused on diet, exercise, and stress relief, there are some other fast growing trends that show how the iPhone and iPad transforming the healthcare experience for consumers.
According to MobiHealthNews, which provides an annual assessment of the market for mobile apps related to medicine, health, and fitness, three new trends are emerging that could significantly reshape our experience of healthcare.
“Welcome to the ultimate virtual cadaver dissection experience!” So begins the pitch on McGraw-Hill’s Anatomy & Physiology REVEALED app for the iPad, a teaching app which overlays photos of real dead people onto rendered models of the underlying gristle.
When it comes to talking about iOS devices in healthcare, most of think of doctors carrying iPads the way that they used to carry lengthy paper charts or clipboards. We think about doctors looking at X-rays and other diagnostic tests on an iPad, perhaps even using the iPad to illustrate a broken bone, illness, or surgical procedure.
Doctors, however, aren’t the only healthcare professionals to be embracing mobile technology. A new study shows that the vast majority of nurses have also embraced mobile devices, particularly the iPhone and other smartphones. It also highlights that differing needs of healthcare professionals when it comes to mobile technology.
Doctors may be fans of the iPad as a clinical tool, but they’re not certain that Apple’s iPad, the 5000+ health and medical apps in the App Store, or other mobile technologies are safe and effective health tools for patients. That’s the gist of a report by PwC Global Healthcare. The report was based on surveys of physicians, healthcare management professionals and payers, and mobile technology users in ten countries around the world.
According to the report, just under two-thirds (64%) of healthcare providers acknowledged that mobile technologies offer potential benefits for patients, but feel that mobile health (also known as mhealth) is virgin and untested territory. As a result, the majority of doctors (73%) don’t suggest iOS or mobile health apps to their patients and some (13%) even discourage patients from using them.
The iPad has been popular with doctors and healthcare providers since it debuted two years ago. In fact, the iPad’s form factor and capabilities are almost tailor-made for many common and emerging uses in medicine like electronic health records, medical and drug reference guides, and even remote diagnosis using FaceTime.
With hospitals rolling out iPad deployments and many physicians in private practice buying them, it was only a matter of time before healthcare-specific iPad accessories hit the market. Griffin Technologies is one of the first companies to focus on making the iPad an even better fit for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals with a new case that’s designed specifically for medical environments.
A team of researchers have discovered that the software used to analyze images of the brain gives significantly different results depending on whether it’s used on a Mac or PC. It means the measurements gathered on one machine can be up to 15% different than those gathered on another — using exactly the same images — which is a serious issue that medical professionals and developers need to fix… fast.
The iPad might seem to be the ideal tool for medical professionals — lightweight, always connected, reliable and with an all-day battery. But none of that will help you if you slip with a scalpel and suddenly have a gusher on your hands, or someone evacuates the contents of their ungrateful stomach all over your tablet.
What you need, doctor, is Griffin’s new AirStrap Mad.
Imagine that you could just point your iPhone’s camera at your baby and it would immediately tell you his vital signs: heartbeat and so on. Or that you could fire up an app and it could pick out tiny, invisible movements from what looks like a still video. Using a process called Eulerian Video Magnification, boffins at MIT are doing this already.
Since the day the original iPad was announced more than two years ago, there’s been a constant discussion about its use in healthcare. At face value, the iPad offers a lot of tools to doctors and other healthcare professionals like access to electronic medical records (EMRs), access to electronic prescribing systems, and access to a wealth of reference materials like medication guides. To some extent the same benefits are available from the iPhone and other smartphones.
Those seem like great additions to a doctor’s daily workflows – both in the office and while on rounds at hospitals. Those great healthcare features don’t live in a vacuum, however. They live on mobile devices that also allow their owners to check-in on social networks, send and receive texts and emails, play games, and do all manner of personal tasks. That has some doctors and hospitals concerned that iPad, iPhones, and other mobile devices could actually be putting patients in harm’s way.
The costs of not complying with HIPAA (the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which includes self-reporting of data breaches, can be steep. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee recently finalized a settlement with the Department of Health and Human Services for $1.5 million for a recent breach (on top of a $17 million price tag for the investigation and remediation actions). HHS seems to be making a a show of high profile enforcement as a way to encourage better compliance among smaller organizations, including hospitals and individual medical practices.
This raises the question of whether or not using the iPad in healthcare increases the risk of privacy violations. If so, will a show of force on the part of HHS dampen the enthusiasm for the iPad in healthcare?
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been invited to participate in a roundtable discussion at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s (NCCN) annual conference on clinical practice guidelines and quality cancer care. The topic of the discussion is Cancer and Corporate America: Business As Usual. At the moment it isn’t clear if Cook will attend (NCCN lists both speakers that have confirmed their attendance as well as those that have not).
The invitation raises some questions about why the organization chose to invite Cook. One obvious answer centers around the role that Cook played in managing Apple while Steve Jobs was fighting the pancreatic cancer that eventually led to his death last year. While that is certainly plausible, there could be other reasons behind NCCN’s invitation.
Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Doctor.
Doctor who?
Doctor who owns an iPad, along with 26 percent of my peers.
A good pun it’s not, but the facts are worth my terrible setup: Fully one quarter of European doctors own an iPad, according to a survey of “1,207 practicing physicians in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the UK.”
