WebDiet January 4, 2009
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WebDiet is an online weight management tool that can help its users eat smarter and healthier. Its a service that proactively sends location-based, customized meal suggestions directly to mobile devices and helps keep track of what you eat.
The ides has potential. GPS-based real-time meal recommendations based on your daily intake requirements and goals can be a simple way to stick to healthy eating habits. Webdiet also has a feature where you can order your meal in advance through your mobile device. Not sure about their coverage though- feature like these need to have granular, wide geographical coverage before they can be found useful by users. Maybe we will see some social networking features in future (who is eating what in your network? Geez..).
They are currently in invite-only beta, but have plans to launch on a freemium model early 2009 (so you can join and get basic service for free, but it’ll cost you to upgrade to a preimum service with more features).
Familyhistory.hhs.gov December 5, 2008
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Dont think this one qualifies to be a 2.0 idea, but it got me thinking about one. On 25th November 2008, the US Surgeon General announced a major upgrade to their Family History Tool. It’s a part of the a national public health campaign, called the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative, to encourage all American families to learn more about their family health history.
The web-based tool lets you create a complete family medical history including the closest family members and others like aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. Users can print this organized family history information and for their family doctor, save to their own computer (*htm format) or share it with other family members (and let them contribute to it too). One can save partial effort and then reload the *htm back at a later time to complete. Same goes for importing it into PHRs or electronic medical records maintained by health organizations.
Knowing a family medical history is important in screening for a great number of conditions (cardiovascular disease; type 2 diabetes; hypertension; osteoporosis; breast cancer, colorectal cancer to name a few). The tool is a useful public awareness tool, no doubt. Perhaps it can spawn something like ancestry.com to let users collaborate and analyze this in a connected community manner. That would enable some fantastic research like manifestation of cancers across several generation and siblings or atavism in general.
ReliefInsite November 7, 2008
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Pain is a subjective symptom that is often hard to correctly diagnose and treat on long-term basis. It’s the focus of ReliefInsite- an online web diary for patients with chronic pain. The idea is first to provide a simple platform to record and store pain-related data and provide easy-to-interpret analysis to patients. Secondly, this enables a longitudinal insight for providers into the key medical details that can help their on-going pain treatment.
The functionality includes a neat body map (screenshot below), notes and basic reporting. The business model includes a premium service (starting at $6.95 for 1 month) that exapnds the list of features to symptoms, reminders, advanced reports etc.
The concept falls in the realm of ‘disease management‘ solutions and is shows what future Healthcare IT solutions are going to be: specific and customized. An aggregation of tools like ReliefInsite can jumpstart a real PHR trend, one that is sustainable. Better still, this begs to be an application on the upcoming PHR platforms like Google Health and/or Microsoft Healthvault.
ClearSense September 26, 2008
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Ever since Google and Microsoft jumped into it, the PHR (Personal Health Record) space has become red hot. So while PHRs try to move from hype phase to reality, startups like ClearSense are positioning themselves to leverage all those rich, complex details about your health.
ClearSense aims to help you make sense of your health information by providing the data analysis technology called REDBOX (developed at Bioinformatics Research Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin). I couldn’t find any information around what exactly makes REDBOX unique- it seems like it consists of data analysis models and algorithms that are optimized for health related data (although the devil is in the details for a technology like this). The company behind both of them is Point One Systems, which seems to have spun off from the Research Center.
The sample reports look Web 2.0-ish, with simple interface and layout. The actionable items and alerts are clearly outlined along with tips and educational material. I dont have enough health information in my Google Health account (fortunately I’m in the pink of health) so there was not point in taking ClearSense for a spin on my info.
Although there is minimal info about ClearSense’s unique selling point, the overall concept may actually prove to be useful if/when PHRs take off in future. Hopefully, ClearSense will survive to see that day.
MyDailyApple June 16, 2008
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MyDailyApple is the consumer oriented website started in 2006 by Praxeon, a life sciences company focusing on semantic search for healthcare information. It brings together medical news, research, blogs, and multimedia around a disease or condition for its users.
Besides searching for personalized health information in natural prose, MyDailyApple users can get relevant medical news and community opinions for their condition. It utilizes the same technology as Curbside.MD (Praxeon’s website for evidence based clinical search for physician users).
MyDailyApple is a Google Health integrated service, which means Google Health users can share their information between the two services.