Health Horizons
The 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.
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.
Eating healthy helps others
Author Jonah Lehrer always seems to have something interesting to say these days—whether in his book, How We Decide, or on his blog, the Frontal Cortex—about our brains and how we make decisions. He recently...
Screening the Genes of Embryos
At the beginning of the year, Duke professor David Goldstein offered what he described as a "confident but uncomfortable prediction" that by 2020, if advances in genetics continue as he expects, they are "bound to substantially increase interest in embryonic and other screening programmes." About a month later, a...
Pumping up the Brain: Reflections on the SharpBrains Virtual Summit
On January 18-20, 2010 Alvaro Fernandez and his team at SharpBrains put together a splendid line-up of speakers on a wide range of topics related to emerging brain fitness research, technologies, and markets, and clinical cognitive and mental health issues. IFTF was proud to be a sponsor of this event.
Although the...
Do Your Best Job Ever!?
Job satisfaction is at a two-decade low, so I guess it shouldn't be much of a surprise that employers have begun enlisting the help happiness coaches as part of their workplace wellness programs. As the...
Biological Previews
Looking for a way to see if a drug might give you side effects--without having to deal with the whole pesky process of experiencing those effects? Science writer David Ewing Duncan highlights an experimental technology from Cell Dynamics International involving reverse engineering cells from the body, such as blood cells...
Why Real-Time Video Matters to Health
On Wednesday, January 19, IFTF released the report The Future of Real-Time Video Communication. This report addressed the question: What is the future of real-time video communication and what will it feel like to live and work in a world where real-time video is ubiquitous?
While the report did not...
Forget the carrot, I need the stickK (or do I?)
Quit smoking, lose weight, get in shape. Now that we are three weeks into 2010, how many of us need help sticking to our New Year's resolutions? Consider signing a "commitment contract" that would set forth, for example, an exercise goal over a period of time, and what it will cost you if you fail to meet that goal. Because loss aversion is a powerful psychological tool, the idea is that...
Shopping for Your Genome
I spent the last couple days at the Personalized Medicine World Conference and one of the most intriguing companies I encountered was a small startup called HolGenTech, which aims to combine genetic data and mobile devices to give people just-in-time recommendations about what they should and shouldn't consume. It's an...
Why replacing hormones seems different from replacing ankles
Readers of the New York Times received an odd juxtaposition over the last couple days that can be roughly summed up as: A small but growing number of older Americans will be headed to hospitals for ankle replacement surgery, and that's totally acceptable; at the...
Brain health is on my mind
Even as I write this, the Health Horizons team is in the middle of participating in the SharpBrains Virtual Summit, which you can follow on Twitter at IFTFHealth and/or using the hash tag #sharp2010. It turns out that today is a busy day for thinking about the brain. The Pittsburgh ...
- Research Director Mani Pande is quoted in the Global Finance story "A wide open world"
- Marina Gorbis and David Pescovitz are quoted in the Times Online story "Hurtling to a scary future"
- Executive Director, Marina Gorbis, is quoted in the AP article "Our devices will spin denser webs of data in 2010s"
- Research Director, Anthony Townsend, testifies before a Senate Committee on Research Parks and Transportation
- IFTF's Executive Director, Marina Gorbis, launches her new blog From Odessa to the Future
- Signtific's FreeSpace game at SigntificLab is featured in a Good Morning Silicon Valley post, "Play your cards right and you, too, can be a futurist"
