Posts on health data, measurement, interoperability, and the technologies that make information more useful.
Every published post with this tag.
For decades, hearing and exercise science depended on controlled studies conducted in clinics and universities, with specialized equipment and groups of volunteers. Now millions of people are generating real-world physiological and behavioral data every day through consumer devices — turning ordinary life into a continuous, global research platform.
Stanford researchers gave AI radiology test questions without the images. The AI aced them anyway. Most people think that's a knock against AI. I think it's telling us something about the images.
For the last 50 years, the engine of technology innovation has been a consumer engine. Consumers have steadily accumulated new health capabilities — including diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring — much faster than healthcare organizations. This has caused a decades-old, large-scale migration of health-related activity from the healthcare system to the consumer tech system. But in my experience speaking with hundreds of healthcare CEOs and board members, these migrations remain largely invisible to healthcare leadership.
The naturalist John Muir saw how everything in nature is connected — and today AI is showing us the same truth inside the body. From Apple Watch studies on atrial fibrillation to new hypertension alerts, hidden links in long-collected data are transforming how we understand health.
The overwhelming majority of health-relevant data — movement, behavior, speech, sleep — is now generated outside the clinical setting. As a result, health innovation is increasingly shifting toward consumer devices and tech platforms that actually hold the data — not the EHR or the healthcare system.
Every map you’ve seen of the coronavirus epidemic obscures the progression of the epidemic, rather than informing. Not just one map, but all of them. Let me explain how.
If you’ve been following the outbreak, you have probably noticed the predominance of mapping in data visualization about the virus. Maps are great, of course, but I suspect that the huge explosion in GPS/GIS/mapping capabilities over the last decade has given us all a “hammer in search of a nail”, applying maps even when better dataviz tools might apply.