EyeNetra raises $2 million for smartphone eye testing

July 9, 2013 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/gimlet-eye.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /] Editor Donna just had to let The Gimlet Eye have this one…

MIT Media Lab’s EyeNetra spinoff recently filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) their raise of $2 million of a $2.5 million round of early-stage financing (scroll down to #13). Their Netra-G app and attachment measures nearsightedness, farsightedness and astigmatism, delivering the eyeglass measurements to your phone. The Test2Connect platform is meant to be flexible for various conditions and on demand for the 2.4 billion people worldwide who have vision problems but little access to eye examinations which may not be affordable. According to Mobihealthnews, eyeMITRA is their next project, in a smart glasses form factor to diagnose diabetic retinopathy. EyeNetra website. The Gimlet Eye squints and notes that EyeNetra was spied by TTA’s Editors back in April 2011 for their Vodafone/mHealth Alliance award, and in Fast Company’s ‘Dr Smartphone’ article a mere 18 months ago.

The health revolution, uncertain: The Australian

July 9, 2013 | by

The Australian surveyed 100 professionals from the local commercial healthcare sector (40 percent doctors, salaries> $100,000, most in small to medium-sized companies) and came up with numerous findings both specific to their overall healthcare system and with some depth on eHealth. In Australia’s mixed public/private system, there is concern about further burdens on the public health system due to rising costs (just like the US) and lower subsidies for private insurance. Regarding eHealth, most of the findings were optimistic, but again affected negatively by government regulation (56 percent).

Because of Australia’s dispersed population, there’s hope that eHealth will ‘revolutionize care for remote communities’ (79 percent). Yet data capture/scanning/management and sharing take the lead in technology present and future, with remote monitoring a distant second. Will eHealth mitigate the pressure on the system? Despite 66 percent responding that “e-health will play a major role in ensuring a sustainable health system”, taking all the charts and graphs (PDF here) in their totality, it was hard not to discern a great deal of uncertainty. Perhaps there is thought of the Australian Government’s difficulties with instituting a national PHR and Nehta’s subsequent legal challenge by MMRGlobal [TTA 11 March]. Fear health revolution is suffering needlessly

Healthsense acquires WellAWARE (US)

July 2, 2013 | by | 1 Comment

Another sign of consolidation in technologies targeted to long term care and aging services providers is the acquisition of telecare system WellAWARE by Healthsense. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It was long rumored that WellAWARE, which lately concentrated on sleep monitoring in LTC and SNF residences, was having long term difficulty seeking next round funding. Some speculated that it was due to its ownership structure shared by users/early funders Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society (GSS) and Volunteers of America (VOA). More recent investors .406 Ventures and Valhalla Partners were also rumored to be eager to exit after 3 1/2 years with no major breakthroughs, significant technology difficulties and management turnover. In retrospect, the 2009 $7.5 million round of funding was inadequate yet quite possibly misdirected in essentials like developing positioning and the business plan. Some evidence: a narrow focus on resident sleep quality versus diversifying capabilities, not aggressively going mobile, and not strengthening technology to be rock solid reliable, a major issue in all telecare/remote monitoring sold into senior housing. In such circumstances, acquisition was WellAWARE’s final bid.

In contrast, once also-ran Healthsense has superior funding from major investors (BC Ziegler, Radius Ventures, Merck, West Health etc.–now joined by .406 Ventures but not Valhalla) and is up to Series D [TTA 28 Sept 12] funding round. Healthsense over the years diversified considerably with capabilities and offerings spanning telehealth and telecare, strategic partnerships and a month ago received the Triple Tree iAward in recognition for clinical effectiveness. Combined, the two companies now serve over 20,000 individuals, which in the mHealth context would be a blip but makes Healthsense a formidable competitor to Care Innovations’ QuietCare and Health Guide. There is no statement in the release regarding customers or staff integration, but this Editor notes that the release is not on the WellAWARE site and most pages (notably Team and Board) are blank, which does not bode well for the reportedly few employees left. Healthsense Acquires Monitoring and Analytics Provider WellAware (release)

Update 5 July. Previously in TTA: Depending on the exact start, this June may also have marked the close or near close of a $8.1 million grant that The Good Samaritan Society received in June 2010 [TTA 24 June 10] to study and operate the WellAWARE system versus traditional care for residents of rural communities. Its operation of the system may very well be ended as active data gathering concludes and the study moves into evaluation of data/writing/publishing phase. But ‘between the lines’ readers will note that neither GSS nor VOA are mentioned in the Healthsense release.

Update 8 July. The local Minneapolis Star-Tribune gleans some additional information about the acquisition from Bryan Fuhr, Healthsense co-founder and current VP Business Development. WellAWARE was bought specifically for its greater capabilities in sleep monitoring such as breathing; the acquisition adds “5,000 new customers to Healthsense’s base of 15,000 people in 24 states”; that major Midwest provider Ecumen, one of the earliest adopters of now Care Innovations’ QuietCare, has switched to Healthsense; and that “there are no plans to cut jobs as a result of the acquisition”. But this must mean at Healthsense, as according to sources, a number of the few remaining employees at WellAWARE were released as the press releases went over the wires.

Will it be the watch or the glasses?

July 2, 2013 | by

While last week’s CEWeek conference along with the FashionWare booth/show were notably light on smartwatches and glasses on display, that may not be true this time next year. And watches seem to be where the action is. In the news are:

  • Foxconn’s prototype smartwatch. (Foxconn is the trade name of the iPhone/iPad manufacturer in China, Hon Hai Precision Industry, which has taken much flak for worker abuse). Reportedly it will not only pick up the usual phone calls and alerts but also some vital signs monitoring. Medgadget, CNET.
  • Qualcomm has filed a name trademark and patent application (26 June) for a device named “Qualcomm TOQ”, described as a “personal communication hub in the form of a wristwatch…” though it may be making the device for others. Phandroid (Whither the long-awaited Lifecomm mPERS watch of the static home page? Beginning to look more and more obsolete?)
  • Pebble’s smartwatch may be hitting the shelves at Best Buy within a few weeks. CNET
  • The Kreyos Meteor smartwatch, currently on Indiegogo, promises that it’s the first with voice and gesture controls to control your smartphone. It’s also 4x over its funding goal at over $400,000–and with 38 days to go. Their page targets a late November in-market date….timing for holiday.
  • Seen at CEWeek’s Innovation Zone:
    • WearIt, seen in CEWeek’s Innovation Zone, is a smartwatch concentrating on sports and activity data plus Bluetooth connectivity for streaming music and ANT+ connectivity for activity/vital signs monitors. At a pricepoint of about $400 it is scheduled to formally debut after CES in January 2014. Gizmag
    • PairASight is a ‘glasses’ device in prototype whose main feature is two-way video and audio, so that a wearer could confer with other people in real time. In this Editor’s opinion, it’s unfortunately named. Gizmag

Samsung speeding hospital EHR/workflows (US)

July 2, 2013 | by

Much has been made of iPad/iPhone dominance in the US hospital/clinician setting, but Samsung is interestingly going after blockages–not heart ones, but workflow and data integration systems. This brief Technorati article on their pilot with Olympic Medical Center (OMC) in Washington state notes how Samsung is working with them and others on digitization (such as cloud services and touch screen monitors) which help to speed physician dictation and chart completion, as well as soon speeding secure interoperable access to patient records. The article unfortunately is short on Samsung-specific details. Now if hospitals and practices work with Samsung on this, can the hardware (tablets, phones, monitors) be far behind? 

New York, New York…it’s a health tech town (Part 1)

July 2, 2013 | by

New York, New York, a helluva town.
The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down.
The people ride in a hole in the groun’.
New York, New York, it’s a helluva town!

From ‘On The Town’, lyrics Betty Comden/Adolph Green, music Leonard Bernstein

Last week’s three events convinced even The Gimlet Eye that New York City is finally a helluva town for many things eHealthy. There were full houses at both Health 2.0’s Matchpoint|East and Health 2.0 NYC’s first-ever Healthcare Pioneers: Healthcare 2020. CE Week, presented by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), prominently featured health tech on the packed show floor and hosted the Digital Health Summit (DHS). Matchpoint|East is our starting point in Part 1. (more…)

DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge winners (US)

July 2, 2013 | by

‘Tis the season for competitions to end and winners to be announced. Earlier this month, the virtual part of DARPA’s multi-level 2013-2014 Robotics Challenge engaged 26 teams from eight countries, both DARPA-funded and ‘open’ (unfunded) competitors, in a series of software tests for specific tasks applied to a simulated ATLAS robot. There were nine winners who will move ahead to the physical DRC Trials with a real ATLAS robot in December 2013. DARPA/VRC press release, Gizmag.

Pilot HealthTech NYC winners

July 1, 2013 | by

The Pilot HealthTech NYC program, which paired health tech innovators with NYC-based providers [TTA 15 March], announced their ten winners on Friday. The companies are: AdhereTech, eCaring, Rip Road, Vital Care Services, BioDigital, Flatiron Health, Sense Health, Bio-Signal Group, Opticology and StarlingHealth. The companies are provided with up to $100,000 each for their pilot projects. A listing of companies and partners is on the Pilot HealthTech website and a summary of the partnerships on StartUp Health’s blog (StartUp Health a program collaborator with Blueprint Health and Health 2.0). Examples:

  • StarlingHealth and VillageCare of NYC will place touchscreen tablets (in eight languages) by residents’ bedsides at VillageCare Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. The tablets will deliver education materials to residents, send requests and real-time feedback to administrators. Wall Street Journal/release.
  • eCaring and Pace University will use the eCaring care management/monitoring system for six months with a randomly selected group of chronically ill, multicultural older adults in Henry Street Settlement’s Vladeck Cares Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC). eCaring release
  • Pace University is also partnering with Vital Care Services, a telehealth provider, to provide services for six months to test the effectiveness of telehealth with diverse communities. This will combine both telehealth monitoring sent to a Pace RN with visits from Pace student technicians to assist with the monitoring process. Pace release.

1/3 of Americans want smartphones for health; 13 percent very confident of data privacy

June 28, 2013 | by

These findings from a survey of over 2,000 US adults conducted by Harris Interactive for Health Day News included a significant sample (unspecified) of smartphone and tablet owners.  In general, it reflected a growing comfort with using mobile communication for health–and a very real concern with online privacy. Interest in the former exceeded 40 percent when it came to booking appointments, asking the doctor questions, finding out test results and checking medication side effects. The highest interest in using smartphones/tablets clustered in the four segments between 18 and 49, with actually little difference between the older quadrants. High interest in tools for self-measurement are nearing the 50 percent tipping point, but weakest in real disease measurement (blood glucose, lung function). Where there’s major concern is the security of this information. The mushy middle of ‘somewhat confident’ is a high 47 percent, with 40 percent clustering on the negative side. How much of this affects adoption of mobile health is not determined. Harris Interactive/HealthDay poll 

Happtique testing app ‘prescriptions’ via doctors

June 28, 2013 | by

Surprisingly, given the directional and management changes at health app curator Happtique [TTA 17 May], the company has just sent out a call for physicians to test their platform for electronically prescribing apps to patients. Your Editor received an email mid-afternoon EDT with this content (PDF). In the ‘beta’, they are seeking a small group of primary care physicians to access their catalogue, formularies and mRx prescribing tool, with a consumer overlay of driving the message to their doctor via the Happtique website to encourage them to sign up. This differs from the mid-May report via Mobihealthnews that Happtique would concentrate on hospital customers only, and not practitioners nor patients. To be determined?

The data-EHR integration hurdle spanned?

June 25, 2013 | by

The fifth of the Five Big Questions (FBQs)*–how data is integrated into patient records–may have finally been answered by Partners HealthCare. They have integrated patient remote monitoring data directly into their EHR, viewable by clinicians alongside patient charts–and also portaled to the patient. The integration was designed by Partners’ Center for Connected Health and includes data sent via Alere Connect (formerly MedApps) from various blood pressure, weight and blood glucose devices. CCH is also introducing mobile connectivity through Qualcomm Life’s 2net hub. Partners HealthCare’s EHR interestingly is an in-house system, but they are transitioning their records to Epic. Dr. Joseph Kvedar, director of the CCH, also discusses how the next step is how to make this data easier for clinicians to read and use in Mobihealthnews. It is about time. Also mHIMSS and Partners’ own press release.

* The Five Big Questions (FBQs)–who pays, how much, who’s looking at the data, who’s actioning it, how data is integrated into patient records.

DHS warning: now medical devices breached (US)

June 24, 2013 | by

Adding to the US Federal Government’s breaching distress, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notice from ICS-CERT (Industrial Control Systems-Cyber Emergency Response Team)  has warned of  “a hard-coded password vulnerability affecting roughly 300 medical devices across approximately 40 vendors. According to their (security vendor Cyclance-Ed.) report, the vulnerability could be exploited to potentially change critical settings and/or modify device firmware.” This unnerving development has not yet been exploited, according to DHS, but could affect patient monitors, surgical and anesthesia devices, ventilators, drug infusion pumps, external defibrillators, mammography equipment, and laboratory and analysis equipment. Not good news. Additional information in iHealthBeat and GovInfoSecurity. DHS/ICS-CERT notice.

Previously in TTA: VA networks breached from overseas; 20 million records affected (13 June)

Quantifying concussion and sub-concussion

June 24, 2013 | by

A short and graphical article on the impact of concussions in contact sports. The HealthWorks Collective article unfortunately only focuses on concussion when there’s mounting evidence that cumulative sub-concussive blows at 15-20Gs are just as harmful as concussions at 100Gs [TTA 5 June] and a cause of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Hard hits in US football can go up to a stunning 150Gs.The main article is from Popular Mechanics which also describes how equipment, including shoulder pads, are being designed to distribute and detect impact. What’s also surprising is how many Gs normal activities such as hopping off a (high?) step (8.1G) and sneezing (2.9G) can be.

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/football-tackle-bar-msc.jpg” thumb_width=”400″ /]

Can self-tracking drive you crazy?

June 22, 2013 | by | 1 Comment

Fine weekend reading. It’s isn’t often that this Editor picks up an article headline ‘as is’ for our readers, but on this fine Saturday morning she does not want to mess with perfection! Carolyn Thomas, a previous Soapboxer and a leading Canadian women’s heart health/health ethics advocate, takes on the Quantified Selfers and, in the view of this Editor, the Digital Health Hypester Horde (D3H) with a bristling critique in The Ethical Nag. Yes, Virginia, there can be such a thing as too much chocolate and too much QSing. Do you really want to live in a heightened state of endless anxiety, with your day depending on minor result twitches? She presents an exchange between a leading heart patient/advocate, Hugo Campos, on Twitter, endlessly self-monitoring via AliveCor, who is having a PVC (skipped beat) episode that is best explained by…anxiety. One early QSer of 40 different health measurements daily abandoned her very public quest stating “Each day my self-worth was tied to the data…I won’t let it be an instrument of self-torture. Any. More.” And there is the time bomb of genetic testing–genomics, a source of endless wonder in the D3H world. A must read (any article that weaves in quotes from Deming and Serres has to be!) Also thank you Carolyn for the citation of The Gimlet Eye’s commentary on the Thomas Goetz ‘diabetic paradox’ (canary in the mine) article.

Got robot? And perhaps make $2 million. (US)

June 22, 2013 | by

DARPA’s annual Robotics Challenge (DRC) is served up again for 2013. This round they are looking for the ‘next gen’ in disaster response and performance in hazardous areas. Entries will be field tested in three stages over this year and next at increasing levels of difficulty:  The Virtual Robotics Challenge, the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials, and the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. And as the writer put it, “you get to build a robot, designed to help people, for money.” See more and application links at Armed With Science.