Senior housing should lead with tech-enabled service to drive costs down

that the current approaches are unsustainable and so last-century

via ageinplacetech.com

Baby boomers do NOT want to go to a senior house,
the cost to house them in a senior house are unsustainable anyway.
And if the cost would be sustainable, there wouldn't be (human) staff to take care of customers.
There's only one way to cope with these problems and that's at home monitoring, collaborative (family) caring and preventive medicine. Mhealth can play a major role in these 3 solutions.

Improve patient - doctor communication with a smartphone

Dutch insurer VGZ made this great iPhone app (Android coming soon) to improve communication between patient and doctor.

After accepting the User Agreement you can use this app to:

• prepare your visit to the doctor by taking notes (you can use a FAQ for your specific medical problem)
• use these notes (checklist) during the visit
• you can even record (by doctors consent) the doctors diagnose

All notes and recorded material are for personal use only and can't be published publicly.

Other features include finding your doctor by GPS and/or rating the service by certain criteria.

I really like the FAQ-feature where you can have a look at questions that most people -with a similar medical problem- ask their doctors.

YouTube Dutch version

Combine this with the increase of 70+ using inet (Pew)

Report: 70 percent want access to mHealth - http://pulsene.ws/xFXY

Pew Internet found out that the biggest growing group of internet users are seniors.
They will rapidly switch to mobile because of simplicity (touchscreens and user experience).
Great combination for mhealth.

Love posterous even more

The recently released groups are already awesome. I love the possibility to quickly switch between the 'regular' site and the groups-site.
Beta for one week for crowdsourcing and bugtracking ... and then releasing it. Talking about fastdevelopment!
And the Posterous Android app, which i'm using to post this, is also extremly easy to use. Big WOW is the easyness to post accross different Posterous sites.

Lightweight lowtech lowcost company communication (part deux)

A quick update on the development of our public bulletin board.
The Archos 7 was a complete failure as you might have read.

I then choose an Acer Aspire Z All-in-one touchscreen PC.
Equipped it with Opera in kiosk mode.
Took some time to set everything up (and remove truckloads of bloathware), but the entire system is now tailor-fit to our needs.

Using the posterous menubar I'm adding more and more content:

• briefing overview
• workschedules
• contacts

During the first weeks it was discouraging to see employees hesitating to use the digital bulletin board.
Even more discouraging to hear employees stating that "I prefer paper" (although I incorporated printable reports with RunJasperReports). 
But as we keep adding information via the menubar ... more and more employees are using the board, more and more frequent.

Mission accomplished.

First mhealthshake website to my knowledge

Mhealthshakes are the combination of wireless devices, wellness/fitness, sharing (social media) and personal feedback from professionals.
Or, as in slide 22: device + self-care + sharing + coaching.
Edwin Padlan is a health enthusiast and a mobile strategist.
He created fit-mob, the first (as far as i know) website dedicated to the combination of these products and services.

On fit-mob, he explores ideas, technologies and business models in the converging wellness and wireless industries.

http://www.fit-mob.com
Enjoy!

Can physicians authorize medication by mobile phone?

Looking for mobile systems where physicians can subscribe and authorize medication.

When physicians visit patients at their home (or carehome / care-center / serviceflat), they should be able to (via network or WiFi):

• Lookup patient (/EHR)
• Lookup patient medication
• (eventually add medication)
• Prescribe & Authorize medication
• (eventually add preferred pharmacy)
  

All via their mobile phone, completely paperless

The patient can then visit the pharmacy and receive the medication.

My online search and my extensive Evernote 'library' didn't give me any answers.
Can you give me a hint?
Thanks!

mHealth SWOT-analysis: blame it on speeding

Is mHealth a hype or not?

That depends on which mHealth segment you are talking about. The mHealth-definition is ready to be re-written due to it's rapid development (like the health2.0-definition).

There are differences between wireless communication in healthcare, tracking systems, mobile apps, at home monitoring systems, ... all of which are considered "mhealth".

Some segments have tremendous future on a short term, some on a longer term, some will be buried by legal barriers, some will have zero chance due to government incompetence and ignorance.

And then you have consumers that are only aware of the shiny side of technology and are outraged the possibilities aren't rolled out more rapidly. Such an outrage, together with social media, fuels hyping. 

The main threat for mHealth (broad definition) stays it's recent acceleration in development AND the fact that it's now available at reasonable prices. Going at warpspeed the mHealth development takes some corners too fast. Mhealth comes at such speed that panicking competitors can only shoot it before asking questions and governments doing likewise. Together with these consequences, this leads to even more blurring and confusing definition(s).

Better definitions will lead to better understanding and correct estimates of the real potential of the different mHealth segments.

I suggest you read 3 excellent unbiased articles on this:

Intel Health’s Eric Dishman weighs in on the “hype and hope of mHealth” by 3GDoctor

Is mHealth at the Peak of Inflated Expectations? by Mobihealthnews

Is the mHealth Hype Justified? by Chilmark Research

Lightweight lowtech lowcost company communication

We've always had an electronic bulletin board.
It did consist of a simple form on our intranet. When filled in, the data was stored in a MySQL database and emailed internally to the Gmail inboxes of the management (8 people).

Follow up of the messages was simple: reply to the message and the management is informed.

Challenge
A lot of that shared electric bulletin board information should be shared to more employees than only management, but also unavailable to the general public!

And if targeted to all employees, that board should be extremely easy to consult and read.

Rapid and fast reading + useability are key.
And reactions of the management (follow-up) on information topics should be open to all too.

Here we go!
First tests with yammer, present.ly, .. didn't run very well because users found it too difficult to use (comparison: here).
And there was a lot of confusion on what info should be put on email and what on Yammer. People had to open different apps and the character limit was to low.
Main usergroup are nurses and while they are incredibly gifted people, most of them are not very interested in using electronic systems ... especially if they consider it slightly cumbersome.

My task is to find a system that is not only supereasy, but also perceived as supereasy.

Less = more
Keeping this simple I chose only to use Gmail as a communication platform.
Public communications (post + reaction) is posted by email to a private posterous, which can be consulted by all employees via a touchscreen tablet.

Management only has to open their inbox to post, read and react. All other employees can consult (only consult, not react) the posterous bulletin board.
The posterous website is lightweight, responds very quickly and it's layout can be trimmed down to a very basic, Spartan looking, company bulletin board.

For the management I've also set up Gmail filters which makes it easier to flip rapidly through all messages.

Cost = 0,00 EUR

Tablet choice
We only need a touchscreen tablet with Wi-Fi and a decent browser (and/or RSS-reader).

An iPad was considered overkill as we only needed very limited functionality. 

And because we work with Google Apps, choosing for Android was a more logical step.

After looking at the specs of different contestants, I bought an Archos 7 Android touchscreen for 150,00EUR.

Tought I had everything figured out, but ...

Scrolling is too cumbersome on this Archos 7. 

Even when disabling all extra features, consulting the bulletin board is'n as snappy as i wished for. Sorry, but 2 too 3 seconds is too much 'waiting' time.

And this Archos has it's own Android appstore. Needless to say this store doesn't offer other browsers (which might be faster). 

Other setback is .pdf files, posterous shows them with Flash. And Flash will only be supported from Android 2.2.

I got what I paid for and the system is currently unavailable too be used as an internal bulletinboard for all employees.

Maybe I have to go for the iPad or an Archos101.

To be continued.

Questions for the mhealth market for seniors

Too bad I couldn't attend the senior mhealth market 2010 conference.
If I had gone, I would have searched for answers on following questions.
Questions:

• Mobile OS for elderly (for smartphone + touchscreen). I personally think such OS doesn't have a great future, but i get a lot of questions for the need of such OS. Do such OS'es exist?
• Apps for elderly that are 'triple blonde proof' (although i prefer the term "Fisher-Price"-apps). Which companies are good at this?
• Mobile phones conceived as hub/router for medical devices (specialising in connecting to devices and forwarding data). Special interested if they also offer connecting to userfriendly and disguised monitors like iMonsys http://www.telecareaware.com/index.php/innovative-imonsys.html
• For service-flats (flats specifically for elderly with basic (paid) services) i'm looking for white-label apps. Besides the registration and interaction (menu-choice, leisure program/subscription , calender planning, ...) such apps should offer medication checks, PERS and video interaction. Here in Antwerp there's a 200-flat experiment in collaboration with Falcom (which runs Linux), but it's too basic imho. Any companies wanting to produce such apps?
• Companies that are targeting young elderly people and focus on easy to use location based services, photo-sharing and tourism (food + guidance). If they concentrate on that core service AND also offer basic medical apps/services, they will do well and sell easier. Which companies are doing so?

BUT: I'm not interested at all in mobile phones or services that:

• only offer service 'coverage' within a certain range of a specific transmitter/receiver. A lot of fall detection devices are doing this. But older people are very mobile, so their product is useless.
• don't have a camera or GPS or Wi-Fi
• have small buttons, tiny text, ...
• are sold by companies that target OLD people (old people don't think of themselves as old .. and won't buy)

You might want to have a look at this great preso by David Doherty from 3gdoctor, given at the conference:

Senior mobile market 2010

View more presentations from 3GDR.

Google Buzz for apps: why is it taking so looooong?

Buzz is an extremely easy and fast way of communicating in your small or large team, even if you're very mobile.

And small to large teams are the target group for Google Apps.

The company buzz can be shielded from the outside world and can be completely integrated with other Google Apps.

Buzz was rolled out early this year and Google premium users are still waiting for Buzz.

Why aren't they implementing it?

• There's no decent way to target specific groups of people within your organisation.
• Tagging is not possible. And as you can't tag, you can't filter on it or create a filtered RSS-feed ... geared towards specific groups in your organisation.
• I'm sure Google will be implementing a modest taskmanager in Buzz for Apps. Might take some time to figure out how they are going to do this.

Whereas Wave was (and is) too difficult for 'regular' users, I'm convinced Buzz has a great future for all Apps users.

I'm eagerly awaiting implementation,

tic, tac, tic, tac, ...

Mobile health and geolocation

Presentation for Flagis about mhealth and location / gps.
Small intro on care & mobile trends.
A lot of practical uses of mobile phones in healthcare, with the emphasis on location based applications.

Mhealth : location based apps

View more presentations from Bart Collet.

Might be a bit too Flemish/Dutch for most English readers, despite the absence of text.

Feedback is always appreciated!

Looking for location based healthy/fitness game apps

... for mobile phones ofcourse AND that are location-exercise-centred.
I know there are a lot of apps that track your course (runkeeper, nokia, garmin, etc). But these only monitor a limited amount of sports.
Sportypal, Tallyzoo and Endomondo have more disciplines, but are still centred around your personal results.

I want to look at it from a different perspective: "look for exercises (of whatever kind) that where performed in your vicinity"

Opportunities

• Compare with friends
• Interact with people doing the same workout
• Challenge people
• Search for people doing the same exercise/trajectory
• Businesses proposing healthy exercises

Ingredients that are put in this blender are: social fitness app + GPS + getupandmove + business advertising

I welcome your suggestions!

mHealth is HUGE (MoMoAMS #14 about Mobile Health)

Preparing for MoMoAMS #14, jan 25, 2010, I made a modest overview of the mHealth scene.

Thanks to the great comments i got on- and offline, i was able to create the actual presentation.

Bart Collet - mHealth is HUGE

View more presentations from Mobile Monday Amsterdam.

More info

You can look at all the presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/event/mobile-monday-amsterdam-14-mhealth/slideshows

Pictures here:

Check out the MoMoAMS website, one of these they will broadcast all events: http://www.mobilemonday.nl/

An arm and a leg for

• The impressive organisational talents of the MoMoAMS team (in particular @mdbraber) and their expertise to produce a full circle 360° overview mHealth program.
• The insights of Nick
• The friendliness of Robert (sure we'll meet soon + frequent)
• A night in an Irish pub in the company of David (anytime! anyplace!)
• The relaxed coolness of Jeanna (don't want to play poker with you though ;) )
• The drive and optimism of Ivor (TOP presentation!)
• The style, 'gentlemenness' and creativity of Fabio (no one noticed Steve Jobs is a Fabio look-a-like!)
• My first psychedelic mushroom experiment in the company of Jen, joining me in this experiment (need someone to take notes!!)

Other excellent blogposts

http://ivor-kovic.com/blog/?p=442

http://3gdoctor.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/mobile-monday-amsterdam-14-mhealth-review/

http://www.nickhunn.com/index.php/archives/520

http://www.mobilecowboys.nl/mobielinternet/11505

http://www.mobilecowboys.nl/mobielinternet/11507

http://www.mobilecowboys.nl/mobielinternet/11508

Online video of the presentations

http://www.mobilemonday.nl/category/events/14/14-talks/

MoMoAms Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/momoams

MobileMonday Impressions (compilation): http://www.mobilemonday.nl/news/impression-of-momo-14/

Posted via email from bart is cooking healthy tech