Health Horizons
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followThe Health Horizons Program combines a deep understanding of the global health economy, user behavior, health and medical technologies, health care delivery system, and societal forces to identify and evaluate emerging trends, discontinuities, and innovations in the next three to ten years. We help organizations work with foresights to develop insights and strategic tools to better position themselves in the marketplace. Health Horizons works closely with the Global Food Outlook Program to examine trends and drivers shaping the future of food.
Rod Falcon | Director, Health Horizons Program
For more information on membership in the Health Horizons Program, please contact Dawn Alva at dalva@iftf.org or 650-233-9585.
Exploring the Future of Games and Health
IFTF was invited by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to help organize a workshop at the White House conference center on health and games. Yesterday, my colleague Mike Liebhold and I were among a group of roughly two dozen researchers,...
Embedded Health: Designing Future Health Interventions Around Our Weaknesses
My most recent Fast Coexist piece is up - taking a look at a concept I wrote about in 2010 called Embedded Health, which argues that the future of health design is to create interventions that help us overcome our weaknesses. It begins:
Samsung...
What 50 Cent Can Teach us About the Future of Empathetic Foods
Since one of my research beats at the Institute is to track the emergence of weird, misguided, and yet, at times, brilliant packaged foods, I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't note the recent release of a new energy shot developed...
HH2011 Forecast Perspectives: Ecosystems of Well-being
This set of Health Horizons forecast perspectives offers a view of six key areas of experimentation that operate across the scales of bodies, networks, and environments. These experiments emerge as responses to six key questions shaping health and well-being.
Why Time Matters by Kathi Vian
New...
Pop-Up Urbanism to Build Community Health
I enjoyed, but was also a bit disappointed by, a recent Health Affairs article by David Erickson and Nancy Andrews looking at the role that community development could play in contributing to community-wide health and well-being. Their point, which is an important one, is that as...
The Toxic Effects of Childhood Stress
The American Academy of Pediatrics released a fascinating, and potentially transformative, statement a couple of weeks ago about something that would seem to be a simple, almost insignificant problem: Stress. Their point, detailed in a...
Wanted: Adaptive Encouragement
It’s that time of year again. The global holiday of January 1, and with it, the annual ritual of self-improvement: setting New Year’s resolutions. It’s a time when we’re called on to reflect on our lives and the behaviors we might want to change—and bombarded with ideas on how to do so. It’s the time of year that makes me crave the realization of one of our...
Avoiding Short-Term Thinking In A World of Big Data
Replacement parts: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology”
Regenerative medicine will replace, restore, maintain, or enhance tissue and organ functions, dramatically improving patients’ health and quality of life, and potentially reducing the cost of their care. Tissue engineering will heal diabetic foot ulcers, reducing the need for amputations; organs grown in a lab will ease our dependence on donor transplants; and...
Using Regenerative Medicine to Preview Biological Responses
At IFTF, we're always looking for new tools to better understand future possibilities--and our 2010 Science, Technology and Well-Being map highlighted a new tool for personal health foresight: Stem cell research. The basic idea is this: the tools of regenerative medicine, which now enable scientists to, for example, engineer skin cells into other kinds of cells, such as heart cells, will...
Understanding Fitness Deserts
A couple months ago, Good had a great feature about the idea of a fitness desert--essentially, a place where, due to some combination of environmental and social factors, getting out, walking around, and exercising is unusually difficult. As far as I can tell, the piece, by Alex Schmidt, is...
Anticipatory Quarantines
It’s exciting to think of the world as a highly connectedplace, where people, goods, and ideas spread easily and freely to the larger global population. Through Twitter, you can hear about what is happening on the ground during a protest in a city thousands of miles away, and through the expansive network of international air travel, you can be on another continent within hours of...
Automated Nourishment
Last year, when we created our Map on the Future of Science and Technology and Well-Being, we were looking for convergences. What experimental, and seemingly disparate technologies might converge over the next decade to change how we pursue well-being?
This was the idea behind the forecast for Automated Nourishment, which puts us into a world...
Biosocial Networks
My colleague Jake Dunagan and I are going to be contributing occasional pieces to Fast company's new Co Exist site. My first piece, on Biosocial Networks, is up here.
Here's the intro:...
IFTF Comes to the Capitol: Health Horizons' Alternative Futures Workshop & SuperBetter Event
Today, the Health Horizons team is headed to Washington, D.C. for two days of IFTF events at Kaiser Permanente's Center for Total Health. On Tuesday, November 8, we have a local pre-conference reception to learn about SuperBetter, a game that seeks to turn everyday...
Augmented Environments: Smart Places and Objects for Health
Staying healthy can be a lot of work, whether it means remembering to take your meds, keeping track of how much pie you're eating or figuring out how to squeeze a jog in between work and dinner. Last year's Map on the Future of Science, Technology, and Well-being 2020 Forecast, explored how some of the discipline and planning required to...
Investing in Local Communities to Improve Health
The New England Journal of Medicine has a fascinating study examining the effects of a low-income housing program impacted participants' health--the results of which suggest that, at least in many instances, improving the local neighborhoods where people live does far more to improve health than trying to...
Health Horizons' 2012 Research Agenda: The Future of Health Information
In 2012, building on our 2011 research lens of well-being ecologies, the Health Horizons team will create forecasts of the emerging information ecosystems for well-being in two ways. We will explore the landscape of information and data at the scales of bodies, networks, and environments. We will also...
Killer Halloween Candy? Why We Look at Risk the Wrong Way and How it Hurts Our Health
When we explain how misinformation can spread through society, my colleague, Bradley Kreit, sometimes uses the example of killer Halloween candy. Various versions of this story exist, some with a pretty elaborate setup, like one in...
Hide from the Digital World--At Your Own Risk
The American Medical Association's trade newsletter had an interesting, if troubling story about a recent rise in medical identity theft--and the major health conditions that can arise from having the wrong information in a permanent digital record. While mistaken medical information offers one scary type of error we'll...
