Have cell phone, will get medical care

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a Business Week headline that warmed the cockles of my Health Horizons blogger heart: "Medical Advances--Through Your iPhone?" The article describes several mobile phone health apps.

Cell phones and health in the developing world

Jan Chipchase is a "user anthropologist" for Nokia, the Finnish cell phone company; he travels the globe to study how people use and think about cell phones. A recent New York Times Magazine article profiles Jan and examines the role of cell phones in the developing world.

Have you taken your smart pill today?

Coming soon to a pharmacy near you . . . pills that can monitor when they have been taken and what effects they are having on your body. Michael Chorost, who spoke at IFTF's recent Ten Year Forecast Conference, reports in MIT's Technology Review about Proteus Biomedical's development of in-body computing platforms.

DNA testing companies come under scrutiny

Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News broke stories yesterday about impending investigaitons by the Departments of Public Health in California and New York into six online genetic testing companies.

Grad students designing the future

The Health Horizons Program often uses "iBuyRight" as a signal of the impact of mobile phone technology. It is an application that can provide shoppers with social and environmental information about a product, enabling them to make purchases aligned with their personal values. iBuyRight was developed as a thesis project by some graduate students at UCBerkeley's School of Information.

Biocitizens and Advertizing

A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.

The lists of restrictions and red-flag categories represented here is about as culturally loaded as you can get, but what drew my attention was the way that biological identities, biological affinities, online collective organization were called out as particularly tricky areas of “behavioral correlation.”

Regular strength or extra strength? Drowsy or non-drowsy formula? Brand name or knock off?

These are the questions I often find myself pondering as I stand in the cold medicine aisle at my local drugstore. This morning, Rod Falcon, Director of the Health Horizons Program, dropped a good old-fashioned newspaper on my desk that announced a solution to these dilemmas. Evincii, a Mountain View, CA, startup that has been in (mostly) stealth mode since 2005, has now formally unveiled its in-store, interactive, over-the-counter (OTC) drug information kiosk.

WELCOME!

Welcome to the Institute for the Future's new and improved website, and the Health Horizons Program's home page. From here, you can access our publications archives (right column) and, if you are a member of Health Horizons, our most recent reports and our conference materials from the last two years. We hope you will come back often to read our blog, which highlights signals we see on the horizon of the global health economy. Your comments are valued--please let us know what you think.

Online relief is in sight for pain sufferers

Another interesting health app I have recently discovered is called ReliefInsite. It bills itself as a source of secure online pain management services, offering real-time pain mapping, monitoring, and analysis. I was struck by its three-pronged approach--it's home page targets patients themselves, health care companies, and health care providers.

A standout (?) among examples of Health 2.0 apps

The ReadWriteWeb blog offers this list of favorite Health 2.0 sites. Many will be familiar to HH members, but one relatively new entrant--Carol.com--stands out for being different. It is not a social networking site; rather, it is a health care marketplace. Limited in scope (for now) to the Minneapolis-St.

Retail DNA

Navigenics is not the only company to market consumer genetic testing (see 23andMe and deCODEme), but it may be the first to do so in a retail setting (at least one as trendy as Manhattan's SoHo District). The New York Times has a short piece about Navigenics' temporary storefront in SoHo.

Citizen Science meets art in San Francisco

Last weekend, an artist-run organization called Southern Exposure (SoEx) held a hands-on workshop in San Francisco that invited people to "[j]oin a team of researchers, artists, and practitioners in a citizen based participatory field study." Participants took part in "collecting, gathering, and analyzing the urban environment in [the city] using a collection of mobile, networked sensors called sensr: citizen science * air quality.

Walgreens is on the job

With apologies for not reporting this news item when it happened a couple of weeks ago . . . Drugstore chain Walgreen is moving into the workplace to provide on-site health care for employers. On March 17th, the company announced that it would purchase I-trax for about $260 million and Whole Health Management for an undisclosed amount.

Microsoft's vision of the future of health

At last month's Mix08 conference, Microsoft played a video created by its Office Labs to share their vision of the future of personal health management It features ubiquitous integrated displays, instant sharing of information, projecting displays, and other advances in natural interface interactions.