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One diabetic’s take on Google’s Smart Contact Lenses — Tech News and Analysis
A different take on the problem & solution
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why would they ignore the fact that as a diabetes patient, it is generally recommended that I not wear contact lenses. Yes, I understand that there are many different opinions about this, but it is generally thought of as smart to not wear contact lenses, as they always carry the risk of increased complications for diabetics. And on top of that if you have say, astigmatism (like I do), then contacts are less of an option.
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Diabetes is a growing problem in countries in South Asia and parts of Asia and Latin America, especially among those who fit in the lower income category; you know, the kind of people who might find contact lenses an expensive luxury.
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It also highlights Google’s fundamental challenge: it fails to think about people as people, instead it treats them as an academic or an engineering problem. Instead of trying to understand the needs of actual people, they emerge with an elegant technological solution.
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As a diabetic, the only solution I am looking for is non-invasive and one that keeps me in a state of constant alertness about my blood sugar levels while matching that data with advice about what I should do.
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Author: Aditya
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Healthcare links 01/20/2014
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Sholay (sort of) 3D
I finally managed to watch Sholay on the big screen albeit in the remastered 3D format, after having seen it multiple times on the small screen. Nothing much to say about the movie itself, as I can but only gauge its impact when it was released in 1975. No wonder why it ran for months (years?) in some theatres on its original release.
However, when it comes to the 3D and remastering parts, I have my reservations:
- The picture quality was considerably affected due to the 3D processing as it requires the frame to be brightened up considerably (3D glasses do block out a lot of light after all) and this leads to highlight clipping. The movie frames looked like it had gone through a budget image processor’s auto adjust & enhance tool.
- Considerable parts of the movie are without much 3D effects, i.e., no double images for stereo vision separation. So, you can actually watch those parts without the 3D glasses and actually enjoy it more, and this is what I did for most of the movie. Kind of defeats the whole Sholay in 3D part.
- They also recomposed and rerecorded considerable parts of the soundtrack (for the surround effects I presume), and this is most noticeable in the wrong ways during the songs. I found the vocal leads pretty subdued with the music blaring through. On top of it, the vocals & music seemed slightly out of sync due to the rerecording. If you have listened to the HMV\SaReGaMa Classic Revival pieces, then you’ll understand what I mean.
They should have probably skipped the George Lucasization and just released it on the big screen for the current generation a la the original Chashme Baddoor. Incidentally, there’s a Sholay Director’s Cut where Thakur kills Gabbar.
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Healthcare links 01/18/2014
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Official Blog: Introducing our smart contact lens project
Something with an easier to digest utility than Google Glasses?
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Healthcare links 01/14/2014
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Patient Portal Improves Medication Adherence: Study – InformationWeek
Portal for medication adherence that seems to work
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iBGStar® | Diabetes management on-the-go
“The innovative iBGStar is the first available blood glucose meter that seamlessly connects to the iPhone and iPod touch allowing you to view and analyse accurate, reliable information in ‘real time’. Using the technology built into your iPhone or iPod touch, you can share this information with your healthcare professional while on-the-go, to help you make better-informed diabetes-related decisions together.”
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The next frontier, attaching health sensors directly into your smartphone
“A modular phone could, in essence, make it possible to completely remove those peripheral devices reliance on indirect connections and be directly incorporated into the phone itself. For example, I have created a mockup of a modular piece that could measure EKG’s. Taking, for example, the currently available product AliveCor, it could be transformed into a module that could directly connect to the phone, therefore bypassing the need of an external battery source and feeding data directly into the phone itself.”
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“The AliveCor System gives you the freedom to easily track your cardiac rhythms whenever you want and receive a detailed report at anytime. This enables you to engage with your doctor between appointments.
The Heart Monitor leverages your smartphone to record, display, store and transfer your ECG through the AliveECG application.” -
Medication Adherence apps are all the Buzz, but are they worth it
A pharmacist’s view
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First, we need to prove that apps can actually modify patients’ adherence to apps through research and identify which patients will benefit the most.
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address privacy concerns about the tracking of patient information and ensure that there will be no negative repercussions for the reporting of non-adherence
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address issues outside of unintentional non-adherence
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Medication adherence: There’s an app for that
Nice list of apps
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Smartphone Medication Adherence Apps
No results to truly validate the effectiveness, but great potential for both pharmacists & pharma companies for top-line growth. Also, a way to capture prescription data. Chemist side kiosks to facilitate such a service might help uptake.
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HealthPrize rewards you for taking your medication
Interesting concept for gamifying the medication adherence
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Visual Wednesdays: America’s Other Drug Problem « Rock Health
Interesting stats
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Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE | Healthcare in the palm of your hand
A competition to follow
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With sensors, apps & data, my smartphone is (almost) my doctor — Tech News and Analysis
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Scanadu | Sending your Smart Phone to Med School
The Scout is here, and is going to be a very interesting self diagnosis tool.
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BlueStar, the First Prescription-Only App – IEEE Spectrum
“The app, called BlueStar, helps people with Type 2 diabetes (the most common kind) by suggesting, in real time, when to test their blood sugar and how to control it by varying medication, food, and exercise. That it requires a physician’s prescription is actually an advantage, because it means insurance companies will reimburse BlueStar’s fee.”
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We’d all be better off with our health records on Facebook – Quartz
An interesting way to think about the health cloud:
“The more I thought about it, the more I decided a Facebook timeline approach could be just what medical records need.” -
Pharmaceutical Executive: The iPad’s Future in Pharma
There are actually 2 scenarios described here:
1. An interaction tool for the doctors & sales force, for which larger devices like the iPad are a good fit
2. A diagnostic tool that tracks the behaviour and symptoms of the patient and thus needs to be with the patient most of the time, and for this, smaller devices like smartphones with dedicated motion sensors\processors are the way to go-
But physicians don’t want pretty pictures; they want help — ways to improve how they practice medicine, the efficiency of how they treat patients, and how they can affect outcomes. And the iPad is not just a visual medium; it is an interactive medium — and interactive in more than just the ability to touch different arrows to see different pictures. The confluence of these two facts offers pharmaceutical marketers what may be their greatest opportunity of the digital age: the opportunity to offer tools that use the full capacity of the iPad to help physicians do their jobs, and help patients stay healthy.
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physicians could use the iPad’s motion sensitivity to test against a measurable range of scores; with sufficient participation over time, this approach could transform the way Parkinson’s, or other movement-disorder related diseases, is categorized within the medical community.
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Smaller devices like smartphones, particularly the iPhone 5S & Moto X with their dedicated motion processors might be a better fit for such use cases
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The iPad in the hands of a patient offers the capacity to quantify disease progression to a level of detail that even the most impressive device in any physician’s office cannot match, since it can be in the patient’s hand at any time.
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Again, a smartphone would be a better fit
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Quite a list of celebrities who overcame the disease
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• Saurav Ganguly – Former captain of Team India Cricket
• Ian Botham – Former captain of England Cricket Team
• Jackey Joyner Kersey – Athlete
• Dr. Rajendra Prasad – First President of India
• Indira Gandhi – Former Prime Minister of India
• John F Kennedy – Former President of America
• Amitav Bachhan – Actor
• Sharon stone – Actress
• Kenny G – Musician
• Charles Dickens – Novelist
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The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Madurai News : Of over 15 million asthma patients, 15 % are children
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Dr. Bose gave a list of prominent personalities who are “winners over asthma’ and that list includes names like Saurav Ganguly and Ian Botham (cricketers), Babu Rajendra Prasad (first President of the country), John F. Kennedy (former American President), Amitabh Bachchan (actor), Elizabeth Taylor and Sharon Stone (actresses), Charles Dickens (author) and Indira Gandhi (former Prime Minister).
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Bookmyshow for doctors
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Private Cloud in Healthcare – Express Healthcare
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a majority of clouds are expected to crop as private entities and not as publically owned ones. Almost all mid sized hosiptals (31-100 beds) and large ones (101 and above beds) are expected to opt for private cloud and build and maintain it in-house.
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Pharma companies will have to interface with the hospital clouds eventually
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For even the mid-sized hospitals, IT often means standalone PCs that are used for maintaining inventory records, patient check in and bill clearance. The systems lack in intergration. Also, most of the hospitals in India lack the idea of business intelligence as of now, and business applications for hospitals, like a hosiptal information management system, are just beginning to gain ground.
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bets are high on the in-premise private clouds. That is where, healthcare as a vertical is deviating from the trend. While some verticals like manufacturing are comfortable with public clouds, others like BFSI are opting for private clouds in service provider’s data centers.
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Compliance is the other big factor that is fuelling demand for private cloud.
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One of the biggest in this is the privacy of patients and confidentiality of clinical investigations. These naturally prompt the healthcare sector to prefer the private clouds.
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However, over and above these issues lies the biggest reason for healthcare CIOs opting for a private cloud.- ‘Security’. Healthcare deals with very sensitive patient data, and data security is one of the paramount concerns of any healthcare service provider.
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A few mid-sized healthcare service providers are putting their non-critical applications like HR, workloads, emails and back-end office automation stuff onto the public cloud.
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What we could also see in the future is that a consortium of healthcare service providers like dentists, cardiologists etc who are often a very well-knit community joining hands to go on a private or public cloud.
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Wowed by Charminar – The Hindu
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The Asthalin pump with medication is always kept handy.
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We’d all be better off with our health records on Facebook
Not literally putting everything on facebook, but liberally using the facebook user interaction paradigms like profiles, status updates etc to build a patient-doctor health cloud.
{Originally posted by Melissa}
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1.5 Ishqiya
I haven’t seen the first part, but the sequel was quite a fun and charming movie with a dash of crudeness every now and then to ground the faux sophistication. At first I was wondering why they had English subtitles, but as the movie progressed and the Urdu got heavier, it began to make sense. They even managed to throw in a couple of guest appearances by the iPhones.
As for the performances, pretty much everyone got under the skin of their characters, and Madhuri Dixit still has that smile and age has not dulled the sparkle in her eyes. Moreover, she managed to hold back the audience from making an exit with the final song of the film that accompanied the credits – a feat that most of the usual credit item numbers fail to do.
All in all, a worthwhile watch.
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Google and the slippery slope of privacy
I just noticed a new Google program called Google+ Auto Backup for Desktop installed on my Windows 7 home laptop. Since I had not installed the software explicitly, I was a bit surprised. While this is par for course on Android with Google Apps being silently installed, I imagined Windows to be somewhat more transparent. Of course, Google has done this before with Chrome, but this time they seem to have leveraged the Picasa install base to push through their software.
Granted that the tool is quite useful for backing up photos, and I have set it up to back up my photo library just as it is configured on my Galaxy S3, this kind of behind the scene surprises is quite worrying. After all, Windows installers of many a software come with their share of add-on bundles – remember those toolbars? Then again, we did have the option to opt out of those add-ons. While this behaviour is similar to the Google approach for Android and their other services, it does not inspire much confidence in a company that I trust with so much of my personal data:
- Google knows where I am all day thanks to the location history on my Android phone
- Google has comprehensive control over my digital identity thanks to my Gmail ID
- Google has copies of all my photos clicked on my phone, and now even ones that were on my laptop
- Google knows the sites I visit and the credentials I use on each thanks to Chrome
I probably trust Google with too much of my data. Coming to think of it, the NSA might as well shut shop and open up a division in Google.
Google is well down its way of the slippery slope with me (and you?) in tow, and I’m pretty worried where things are headed.
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2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Nothing spectacular, but archiving for future reference.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,500 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
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How to change your airtel corporate mobile plan
I have a corporate airtel postpaid mobile connection and the plan was not very cost effective for my usage pattern. However, trying to change the plan by giving a call to their 121 call centre was of no use as the support staff seemed to lack the access to change corporate plans (in fact they didn’t even seem to have proper visibility to my eligible corporate plans). In fact, the phone support told me to visit an airtel relationship centre for a plan change. The website wasn’t of much help either as corporate plans can’t be switched online, and the airtel website is seriously lacking in any kind of details on postpaid corporate plans.
Email was a different story, and their response time is pretty phenomenal with replies coming in within 4-5 hours even on weekends and nights. And this was the route that ultimately got me success. So here go the steps:
- Log on to the airtel account management site (if you know your registered email ID, jump to step 3).
- Check your email address under the personal information section and update if not active (you can also sign up for an ebill under the bills section).
- Send a mail to 121@in.airtel.com from your registered email address with the name of the plan you want to switch to, and your mobile number as the subject. In case you are not sure of the plans you can switch to, drop them an email first asking for the available plans. Word of advice: keep your message short, simple and to the point.
- You should receive a confirmation mail and voila, you’re done!
If you are curious on the plan I got, it was the Alive Net CUG 375 Combo Plan with 600 minutes of local & STD talktime and 1 GB of 3G data as part of the package. There are similar combo plans available that are tuned for local usage if you are interested, and they are quite economical when compared to your usual subscription of a call plan with a separate data plan.
