Faces of Digital Health

Roi Shternin had medical ambitions while he was still a student. Before he turned 20 however, his physical health started deteriorating to the point where he couldn’t get up from his bed. He visited 33 doctors. “The 33rd doctor told my parents that I will never get married or have a career, so they should just get me an as comfortable bed as possible, so I can die with dignity,” Roi remembers toda...

Social isolation and loneliness are linked to several health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease, and even death. Can these problems be alleviated with the help of robots?  A group of French innovators created Cutii — a robot for the elderly that looks like a screen on a stand that moves...

Building communities is time-consuming and demands special soft skills. Aline Noizet is a digital health connector with rich experiences of building and getting to know communities in digital health. She started her digital health journey working for the digital health startup Doctoralia in Barcelona in 2011. She later became an important part of Health 2.0, followed by a position at Bayer’s G4A....

In May 2020, Medical Device Regulation goes into effect. Digital health companies providing software intended for medical use will need to comply with new requirements. According to Jovan Stevović, CEO and Co-Founder of Chino.io, companies are much better prepared for MDR than they were for GDPR. In general, medical devices are products or equipment intended for medical use. These include long-ter...

According to Clearwater cyberIntelligence Institute, one of the key issues in data breaches are user authentication deficiencies. These include password strength requirements, single sign-on controls, and locking accounts after too many failed login attempts are the three primary risks around user authentication - generic password use, physically posting passwords on a workspace, and or unencrypte...

Nine opinion leaders in digital health - John Nosta, Rafael Grossmann, Aline Noizet, Brian de Francesca, Irma Rastagayeva, Eugene Borukhovich, Maneesh Juneja and Nana bit Avragim and Levi Shapiro - answered a seemingly simple and open-ended question: What are your predictions about trends in digital health and healthcare in 2020? 1. Experience shift 2. Positive future for digital therapeutics 3. T...

 South Africa is a restless country with Race and ethnicity still causing a lot of tension in the society. On the healthcare side, there are only 0.9 doctors per 1000 people in the country. Out of 59 million people, 9 million people access healthcare through private providers; the rest are in the public system. Soon, however, the system might change with the introduction of National Health Insuran...

In 2016, the UK based company Babylon Health, radically transforming access to primary care in the NHS in the UK, opened a subsidiary in Rwanda. The Rwandan version ob Babylon is called Babyl, and has by today attracted over 2 out of 12 million people in Rwanda. Out of 2 million people, 700.000 consulted Babyls healthcare workers, says Patrick Singa Muhoza, Medical Director at Babylon health Rwand...

As of 2016, Nigeria was Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation. By 2050, Nigeria is expected to be one of the ten largest economies in the world. Healthcare wise, the country is in dire need of reform and reinforcement in medical forces. According to the World bank, there are 0.4 doctors per 1000 people and 1.5 nurses and midwives per 1000 people. Ocoche Ubenyi is one of the country’s d...

Africa has 54 countries, that differ a lot in terms of their quality of care, political situation, and innovation. This short series explores healthcare in 4 African countries: - the most populous African country Nigeria with 200 million people, presented by a medical doctor and entrepreneur Ocoche Ubenyi, CEO of Nimedix Ecosystem,- South Africa with 59 million people is presented by a serial entr...

If you go to digital health conferences, you might have noticed people wearing pink socks. Or a guy with a long beard and a kilt caught your eye. That was Nick Adkins - the Co-Founder of Pinksocks Life, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting authentic human connection around the world. Pinksocks was founded five years after Nick attended Burning man in 2010. For those who don’t know it - Bu...

Less than 600 people traveled to space by today. What do we know about space health so far, and why does it matter for the broader population? A discussion with Ilaria Cinelli - a biomedical engineer with a structured PhD in neural engineering. While she’s not an astronaut, she is very passionate about space and has completed the Space Studies Program of the International Space University at TU De...

What are the basics of sleep hygiene, the importance of sleep and harm lack of sleep causes to our health? Richard Jacobs is the host of Future Tech Podcast and Future Tech Health Podcast. By now, he has interviewed 1800+ companies in artificial intelligence, stem cells, 3D printing, gene editing, bitcoin, blockchain, the microbiome, quantum computing, virtual reality and space exploration and mor...

The sixth and final episode of a short series about AI in healthcare features Bart de Witte and a discussion about data privacy, the future of AI models in healthcare and the issue of a potentially dystopian future if we decide to let monetization of healthcare data get out of control. Bart is a digital health tech expert who worked as an executive director for the world largest technology vendors...

AI models in the field of stroke with Vince Madai and Michelle Livne from Charite hospital in Berlin, who work on predictive models for decision support systems for the treatment of strokes. Vince is a senior medical AI researcher at Charité with an M.D., a Ph. D. in Medical Neuroscience and an M.A. in Medical Ethics, and Michelle is a PhD machine learning engineer with extensive experience in app...

Voice applications in healthcare are used in telemedicine, for remote patient monitoring, clinical trials, and more. Bill Rogers, CEO of Orbita - a leading provider of conversational AI for healthcare - explains the current state of voice assistants in healthcare. Orbita helps healthcare organizations tap the power of voice assistants, chatbots, and other conversational AI technologies to engage p...

In 2016 FDA approved the so-called artificial pancreas - Medtronic’s MiniMed 670G system (Medtronic) a hybrid closed-looped system for glucose measurement and insulin delivery. A lot of companies are developing AI supported decision support systems for doctors and patients. This episode dives in the complexity of diabetes, how it is treated, what role does glucose have on health and how is technol...

The idea that AI will replace radiologists comes from the fact that today’s AI models models are very good at pattern recognition. But in reality, the “rich data” coming from radiologists is in the radiology reports, which are to a large extent unstructured. As elsewhere, the 80:20 rule applies here, says Woojin Kim. So the interesting thing are the NLP models mining radiology reports, he said in...

Short series about AI in healthcare: 1 - the potential impact of AI on patients When reading about how digital health and AI are improving disease management, waiting times in decision making healthcare, we don't only read about cost savings. These novelties show how patients are becoming more and more equal to healthy people and how diseases are affecting the quality of lives less and less due to...

No matter which country you go, the predictions about the healthcare workforce estimate that we will encounter significant shortages of doctors in the future. It’s less often heard that the prediction for shortages of nurses is much higher compared to doctors. So today, the spotlight is on them. Shawna is an entrepreNURSE with a wide range of experiences in emergency medicine, cardiac, critical ca...

South Korea is famous for many things - worldwide, the Republic of Korea has by far the highest robot density in the manufacturing industry, the third-largest market for virtual currency, behind the United States and Japan. South Korea is called the plastic surgery capital, because of the cultural beauty obsession. According to a recent Gallup poll, one in three South Korean women has undergone co...

Singapore, also known as Asia for beginners, is a 5.6 million people country, offering an encouraging environment to tech companies and expats. The government in Singapore is promoting IT adoption and innovation in healthcare. National Electronic Health Record system was rolled out in 2011. Combine that with countrywide connectivity, mobile-first population, and a lot of openness for collaboration...

If anyone, India is in dire need to increase access to quality care. According to WHO, the density of doctors of all types (allopathic, ayurvedic, unani and homeopathic) in 2001 was 8 doctors per 10,000 people, and the density of nurses was 6 nurses per 10.000 people. Project ECHO® is one of the players with an important role in bringing patients quality care with the help of a revolutionary medic...

China’s population is larger than the population of the US and Europe combined. The country is becoming the leader in AI development. The enabling factor for China’s rapid advancement in AI is that Chinese Tech giants and government agencies are investing heavily the most important fuel for AI development - data infrastructures. In healthcare, for example, the company Yitu has a team of about 400...

Asia is the second-largest digital health ecosystem in the world. 2018 ended with a record-breaking 6.8 billion US dollars invested. According to IBC Asia, the digital health market is expected to reach $379 billion by 2024. Asian countries are leapfrogging the west in tech adoption. Many countries are turning into cashless societies where all transactions are done through mobile phones. At the sa...