Medicine X

As previously reported here, Stanford researcher Abby King, PhD, and colleagues have been testing different smartphone apps to determine what type of framework best promotes exercise and eating healthy among older adults.

All three apps in her study used the accelerometer in participants’ smartphone and a custom program to monitor how active individuals were during the day. The analytic version used goal-setting and feedback to motivate users. The social comparison design utilized support and competition among a group to encourage participants to meet goals. And the third one, the game-style app, promoted attachment to an avatar, a digital bird, that thrived or languished depending on the healthy habits of its “owner.”

In a talk at last fall’s Stanford Medicine X conference, King shared results from her research and discussed which types of apps were most effective in improving healthy behaviors. The video, which was just posted online, offers some interesting evidence on how mobile device apps can change users’ behavior quicker than traditional methods.

Previously: Computer-generated phone calls shown to help inactive adults get – and keep – moving, Eat a carrot and exercise – or your iBird dies, Research shows remote weight loss interventions equally effective as face-to-face coaching programs and Monitoring patient wellness from a distance

The Cognitive Aids in Medicine group at Stanford is leveraging emerging technologies to develop dynamic, interactive tools that streamline and standardize protocols for managing medical crises. Leslie Wu, a PhD candidate in computer science at Stanford, presented on the effort and demonstrated its early prototype system at the 2012 Stanford Medicine X conference.

Wu’s talk, along with several others, was recently made available on the conference website. In the presentation, Wu explains how cognitive aids have helped other fields, such as aviation, standardize protocols and improve safety. Although the idea of using checklists in medicine has been championed by Harvard physician Atul Gwande, MD, and supported by the World Health Organization, Wu points out the paper versions can be significantly improved using technology and design-thinking concepts. Watch the video to find out how the group’s software-based tool performed during a medical crisis and how those results compare to the absence of a cognitive aid and traditional checklists.

Previously: Stanford Medicine X conference issues call for presenters and papers, Sully Sullenberger talks about patient safety and Surgical checklists and teamwork can save lives

Updated 03-18-13: The deadline for submitting abstracts for the Stanford Medicine X 2013 conference has been extended to April 5 as the organizers continue to develop the program.

Stanford Medicine X, which explores how emerging technologies will advance the practice of medicine, improve health and empower patients, returns to campus this September. Conference organizers recently issued a call for presenters and papers and are accepting submissions until March 15.

This year, the conference includes an ePatient track focused on issues related to participatory medicine and the role of technology in empowering patient engagement in their own healthcare. Additional tracks include business, research and practice. Submissions are being accepted on the Medicine X website.

Presentations submitted in the research track are eligible for publication in the conference’s partner journals, PLoS ONE and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). Accepted abstracts will be published in an electronic publication entitled the Stanford Medicine X Proceedings.

Last year’s event attracted nearly 450 attendees from 30 countries. The event’s video archive offers a sampling of the keynote speeches and presentations from the 2012 program.

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

Photo by Stanford Medicine X

This September, the Medicine X conference returns to Stanford. Larry Chu, MD, executive director of the conference, announced on the Medicine X blog that the event will be held September 27-29 at the medical school’s Li Ka Shing Center for Learning and Knowledge.

Medicine X explores how emerging technologies will advance the practice of medicine, improve health and empower patients - and last year’s event was a high-energy showcase of innovative ideas. The event’s video archive offers a sampling of the keynote speeches and presentations from the 2012 program.

Photo by Stanford Medicine X

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

Last weekend at Medicine X, CNN contributor Amanda Enayati presented a talk on how emerging technologies can relieve stress, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders. Today, Enayati posted a version of her presentation on CNN.

In the piece, she discusses the rapidly growing number of devices aimed at measuring and tracking our stress, and how future technologies, including some in development at Stanford, may help us better manage our mental health. She writes:

Not only will we start to design products that help us lower our stress levels, we will also figure out how to design products in existing categories — for example, household appliances, computers, cars and websites — that are less stressful.

Neema Moraveji, director of the Stanford Calming Technology Lab, is at work designing a calming e-mail reader that delivers and organizes messages in a less frenzied way.

“People are reconsidering the blind pursuit of technology as an end. Some of us in the tech community are thinking about the effects of digital toxins the same way engineers, policy-makers and designers consider environmental toxins,” Moraveji said.

Previously: Countdown to Medicine X: Turning to emerging technologies to relieve stress, anxiety and PTSD, Firdaus Dhabhar discusses the positive effects of stress, Stanford health psychologist Kelly McGonigal discusses how stress shapes us and Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky talks stress and the brain

Stanford’s Medicine X conference closed yesterday with a presentation from ePatients who participated in the IDEO Design Challenge.

During the workshop, which was held last Friday at the IDEO headquarters in Palo Alto, ePatients got the opportunity to learn the company’s design process and collaborate with IDEO designers, researchers, technologists and health-care providers to develop new ideas for improving patient care.

Workshop participants were divided into five teams, and each team included an ePatient who has experience managing a chronic disease and who uses technology to help facilitate his or her own care. Each patient brought a statement problem, which was based on their chronic illness and application, for the team to address in working through the design-thinking process.

According to IDEO Partner Dennis Boyle, this was the first time the company had collaborated with patients as members of a design team.

Three of the ePatients - Nikolai Kirienko, Sarah Kucharski and Scope contributor M.A. Malone - took the stage alongside moderator Nick Dawson, a Medicine X board member and director of community engagement at Bon Secours Virginia Health System, on Sunday to discuss their experiences participating in the design challenge.

Kirienko described working with team members to create a participatory health record that would help ensure patients weren’t the last to know about a doctor’s orders. “The thing that struck me most about the workshop was that it was a very healing process,” he said. “Having spent thousands of hours in the hospital, it was an amazing experience to be able to think about those problems so that patients in the future wouldn’t have to encounter some of the same situations.”

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It was my privilege this past weekend to moderate a lively Medicine X panel comprising three speakers who’d just given presentions on different phases of the avalanche of information already rumbling down the mountain of scientific curiosity. Sean Bonner talked about his nonprofit company Safecast‘s efforts to put into place myriad mobile sensors to monitor radiation in the wake of the Japanese reactor disaster. Stanford medical data king and father of several biomedical start-ups Atul Butte, MD, PhD, described how his team mined public databases to isolate a protein that’s likely a key player (and until now an entirely overlooked one) in the development of Type 2 diabetes. Pete Binfield, PhD, former publisher of the open-access journal PLoS ONE, explained how his latest venture, PeerJ will push the open-access envelope even further.

I had a bone to pick concerning the quality of the information that’s being scooped up, sifted, sorted, and spewed out in ever-increasing quantities. A few weeks ago I got a notice in the mail informing me a traffic violation on my part had been picked up by an automatic tracking device. Seems I’d evaded a two-dollar toll on Highway 261 on Sept. 10, at 6:50 a.m.

But Sept. 10 was a Monday. On Mondays I work from my home in San Francisco and don’t open my eyes till 6:30. Highway 261 is in Orange County, easily 500 miles away. So, say I flew out of bed at 6:30 sharp, skipped breakfast and brushing my teeth, raced down the stairs, and jumped in my car … I’d still have to drive really fast (like, 2,000 miles an hour) to get to that toll booth within 20 minutes. Assuming I obeyed even half of the traffic signals on my way out of town, we’re talking relativistic speeds.

And I got popped for jumping a crummy two-dollar toll, but not for speeding?

I knew something was fishy. So I called the 800 number and they checked their photo and, sure enough, they were off by one digit on the license-plate number. They were very nice about it, too – which tells me this happens a lot. It’s an example of what people in the bioscience biz call a “false positive.”

And it got me thinking about large-scale data collection and crunching. So I asked Sean, Atul, and Pete how their respective approaches would safeguard or improve quality. Their unanimous prescription, captured in this video (our session starts at about 02:59:50), in a word: transparency.

Previously: Mining medical discoveries from a mountain of ones and zeroes, The data deluge: A report from Stanford Medicine magazine and Stanford’s Atul Butte discusses outsourcing research online at TEDMED
Photo by plushev

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

This weekend at the Medicine X conference, Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das, PhD, shared with the audience how he and colleagues are tapping into the online gaming community to accelerate researchers’ understanding of DNA’s once-unsung chemical cousin, RNA. Das’s laboratory partnered with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to design a video game, called EteRNA, that allows players to design RNA molecules. Researchers synthesize the “winning” RNA sequences on a weekly basis, determine if they fold up as designed and feed the experimental findings back to the players.

The game now has more than 51,000 players, and more than 4,400 have logged enough hours playing the game to submit lab designs. These users are churning out roughly 1,000 designs on a weekly basis, but Das’ lab can only synthesize about eight each week. As Das explains in the above video, he and his team hope to solve this problem using an approach comparable to cloud computing that they call “cloud biochemistry.”

Previously: How play and games can impact the future of science and health, O’Reilly Radar Q&A looks at how games can improve health, Paramecia PacMan: Researchers create video games using living organisms and Mob science: Video game, EteRNA, lets amateurs advance RNA research

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

Yesterday afternoon at the Medicine X conference here, artist-in-residence Regina Holliday captivated attendees with her heartfelt and empowering presentation on patient engagement.

A widow and mother of two, Holliday speaks nationally about patient rights and challenges the health-care system through a range of art projects. One of her artistic efforts is her walking gallery, a collection of more than 107 jackets that capture the causes of the patients who wear them. A number of Medicine X attendees have worn their jackets this weekend.

In the video above, Holliday discusses her work and passionately calls for people to join the ePatient community and use their voices to collaborate with providers, pursue new health systems, and develop patient-centered design solutions.

Previously: Image of the Week: Regina Holliday’s Medicine X (redux) and How Regina Holliday uses art to advance the discussion about patients rights

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.

This image comes from the Medicine X conference Flickr photostream and shows renowned architect and designer Michael Graves delivering his keynote address, “People First: Redesigning the Hospital Room.”

During his Saturday talk, Graves shared his personal story of being diagnosed in 2003 with a central nervous system infection that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He described in great detail his first few days in the hospital and how certain limitations of the patient room’s design made small daily tasks, such as shaving, overly burdensome for someone confined to a wheelchair.

As he adjusted to life in a wheelchair, Graves stayed in numerous hospitals and rehabilitation centers, and each one exhibited design flaws that made his recovery more challenging. His dissatisfaction led him to use his design acumen to reshape the hospital experience by leading a functional and aesthetic transformation of hospital furnishing and equipment.

More news about Stanford Medicine X is available in the Medicine X category.