Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

May 21, 2009

Trusera shutsdown

Filed under: Internet — Tags: — Raja @ 9:30 am

Community is a very important resource for health realted information and peer support. It is sad to read that trusera, a health community site, where people share their health realted experiences with each other is shutting its doors.

Trusera, a health 2.0 community where users can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions, is officially closing its doors on May 27, according to a blog post on the site. We originally reported on Trusera’s possible shutdown in March, when the startup was nearly out of money.

Founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, Trusera launched almost a year ago. Trusera sought to bring users together who were suffering from similar health conditions. The site also took other personal information into account when connecting people, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Trusera would then match people up according to all of these factors and allowed users to receive email updates whenever a new match submitted a story or tip, which meant that users didn’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information.

In the blog post, Trusera’s site manager wrote that the startup had run out of funds and could not sustain operations. Although the site was innovative and had steadily attracted a growing and dedicated set of users over the past year, it was still a small community. The health 2.0 space is a competitive landscape to survive in—there are a number of websites, including Medpedia and PatientsLikeMe, devoted to online forums for people to share their health-related stories.

April 22, 2009

Health on iphone

Filed under: Mobile — Tags: — Raja @ 8:51 am

Matt Marshall has a nice post on the health applications on iphone 3.0.

For my entire life, I’ve relied on habit. I wake up when my eyes open in the morning (sometimes prompted by the alarm clock), eat when my tummy says its time, exercise in the mornings, and fall asleep when I’m dead tired.

But the applications being built for the latest “3.0″ version of the iPhone operating system — and likely soon for a number of other smartphones — promise to monitor my every step, my cycles, my health, constantly, via sensors on my skin. They may make me even more efficient.

Right now, they’re focused on people with serious ailments. Last month, LifeScan, a Johnson & Johnson company focused mainly on diabetes monitoring devices and software, demonstrated a Bluetooth-enabled blood glucose monitor that syncs with the iPhone’s 3.0 operating system. The video demo is below. The iPhone 3.0 OS, to be released sometime this summer, lets the phone interact with other devices, thus making all this possible.

Looking forward to this, a bunch of companies are working away on applications that monitor all of your six vitals: These vitals are temperature, heart rate, heart rhythm, respiration rate, blood pressure and 02 saturation (or the amount of oxygen you have in your blood). I’m told there’s no reason that all six vitals can’t be tracked from a single sensor — which would then be synced to a phone application via Bluetooth. With all that information, the phone could do some cool stuff: If you drink too much caffeinated coffee on an empty stomach, your phone might be able to alert you that you’re extremely agitated and that you may want to cool off before you slap your annoying office-colleague upside the head.

The Lifescan application (screenshot at left) was created as a prototype for Apple to show off the iPhone 3.0’s capabilities — which allow companies to build apps customized for external devices like a glucose meter — but the product is not ready for commercial launch. Why use an iPhone, instead of the non-phone version of the wireless software? For one, LifeSpan says diabetics often feel lonely, and hooking up to the iPhone will let them communicate with others using social networking features.

 

 

Here is a video on medical apps & iphone:

March 31, 2009

mobile will revolutionize health

Filed under: Mobile — Tags: , — Raja @ 2:46 pm

CTIA is having panel today on mobile health (thanks dinesh!).

John Walls, Vice President of Public Affairs for CTIA, a leading wireless industry association, recently interviewed the Center for Disease Control’s  Dr. Jay M. Bernhardt, who serves as the CDC’s Director of the National Center for Health Marketing.

“Mobile communications is absolutely going to revolutionize not just health communications, not just public health, but, I believe, health in general,” Bernhardt said during the interview. “We can put [health-related information] on television, on  billboards, or your doctor can tell you… but one of the big problems with mass communications is that it’s hit or miss… [while] mobile technology is always within an arm’s reach.” 

CTIA Wireless Health Interview

You can watch the video of the above interview here. No embed code was available.

I am a big believer in the potential of mobile in revolutionizing healthcare. We will soon be launching an exciting service in this area.

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