Jawbone Acquires BodyMedia and Launches Partner API

Today it was announced that Jawbone has acquired BodyMedia. Here’s an excerpt on the acquisition and announcement from pandydaily.

Today Jawbone, the company that makes the wearable “quantified self” band UP, issued two announcements: it’s rolling out an API so the device can integrate with other apps and connected devices relating to health and wellness. It’s also acquiring BodyMedia, which makes an FDA-approved weight-loss device called FIT that’s been used on the TV show “The Biggest Loser.”
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The BodyMedia acquisition is a talent and intellectual property grab – it has 87 patents in its IP portfolio – but it will retain its name, continue producing the FIT, and keep its office in Pittsburgh open. The company would not disclose any other terms of the sale. The acquisition is a smart move in building out the product’s abilities in the future. BodyMedia has a medical bent, so surely future iterations of UP will pay more attention to things like disease monitoring.

But the really intriguing news is the API. It will allow partner apps to be able to tap into a user’s Jawbone data so she can find out more about her health and wellness habits. For example, a user can log onto MapMyFitness and view workout data in UP. Or he can step on a Withing scale – another connected device – and import his weight into up and see it in the context of sleeping and eating habits.

I think the article is right that the biggest asset that Jawbone is acquiring is the patent portfolio of BodyMedia. The other hard part is that I think the BodyMedia brand is better known than the Jawbone brand. So, the company will have a tough decision in how to go forward. It will take some time for them to work through the existing inventories and merge the product lines. It will be fun to watch.

I find the Jawbone API a little disappointing since it’s just a partner API. I know they say their intent is to eventually open up the Jawbone data to anyone, but I don’t understand why they wouldn’t do this from the start.

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April 30, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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Eyewire and Crowdsourced Science

One of the really interesting people I met at TEDMED was Amy Robinson. She’s from MIT and is working on some of the coolest brain technology out there. I’d first seen something similar to their work at CES where they had you control a helicopter with your brain. It’s pretty insane technology. At TEDMED they did a similar thing where you’d control a Xerox cube with your brain.

Amy also taught be about their game to map the brain called EyeWire. It’s been around for ~5 months and already has 60,000 players from 130 countries mapping neurons in 3D to decipher information processing networks in the brain. More simply put, they have 60,000 people playing games to benefit science.

It’s such a beautiful concept. I logged in and started doing some of the mapping. It’s really simple to get started, but I can see how you’re going to have to be pretty creative and detail oriented to be successful at the game. Plus, it’s cool to think that you’re contributing in even a small way to future scientific discovery.

I’ve long loved the idea of crowdsourcing and I’m really glad to see it being applied to science and healthcare. It’s amazing what a crowd of people each contributing a little bit can create.

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April 29, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT
Tags:Amy Robinson  EyeWire  MIT    

Smart Phone Health Care By the Numbers

I thought it would be fun to take a moment and look at the various website statics for Smart Phone Health Care. It’s amazing how far this website has come since I created the first post back on January 24, 2011. I think we’ve generally held true to that vision of covering many of the latest smart phone apps and technology. We plan to continue doing so into the future.

I hope that as we continue to grow the site that we’ll be able to cover more of the healthcare medical devices as well. No doubt there’s a merging of the smart phone and medical device communities. In fact, many would happily call your smart phone a medical device. In some ways, they’re right (Just don’t tell the FDA I said so).

Now for some of the numbers, we’ve created 298 blog posts and had 270 comments approved. I’d like to get the comment number up, but it’s still nice to see that we have more engagement than many blogs. Getting comments can be a hard challenge. As of right now, we’ve had 116,729 pageviews.

I also wanted to say a big thank you to the advertisers that have supported Smart Phone Healthcare. Canon and Amazing Charts are both advertising on the site and their support is much appreciated. If you’re looking for a scanner, check out what Canon has available. If you’re looking for an EMR, you should definitely take the time to check out Amazing Charts. They’ve had an iPhone EMR app since 2011.

Finally, a big thanks to David and Katie who have written a lot of the content you’ll find on Smart Phone Healthcare. They’ve both done an excellent job. I look forward to the next 300 posts.

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April 24, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth
Tags:mHealth Advertising  Mobile Health Advertising  

Smart Phone Health Exam at TEDMED

One of the big announcements going into TEDMED was the idea of a Smart Phone Physical. It was such an intriguing proposition that Katie wrote about it here and Anne wrote about it here. Maybe that means we should coordinate content more, but in some ways I think it’s interesting to see what topics my writers find worthy to write about. The fact that they both independently wrote about the concept says something important.

I think the core message is clear: we all would love a smart phone physical. I think this is underscored by the opposing idea that we all hate going to the doctor. It’s not about the doctor in particular, I love the doctors I’ve seen. There’s just nothing beautiful about the experience of going to the doctor. Those visits are plagued by long wait times, added expense, uncomfortable situations, and often poor customer service.

I realize there are exceptions to the above, but this is the stigma of a visit to the doctor. Some of this can be solved by rethinking the physician visit (something some doctors have really done well) and some of it is just inherent with the nature of a medical visit. The later is difficult to change. The former is likely why the smart phone physical is so intriguing from a patient perspective. It flips the experience on the head and in many ways takes out the unpleasant parts of a visit to the doctor.

Although, the following tweet illustrates that just doing the physical on the smart phone won’t solve all the issues:

Just because the visit is electronic doesn’t mean that they can’t still have long wait times, added expense, and poor customer service, but I still love the idea of my kids terrorizing my house instead of the waiting room.

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April 22, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones  Telemedicine
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Lose Weight and Win Money With DietBet

After I posted about the study that found financial incentives to be a good motivator for weight loss, I have been on the lookout for more websites popping up like Gym Pact. I was curious to see how much something like this would motivate me, and since I no longer belong to a gym, Gym Pact was out of the question. Well, today a friend of my sent me an invitation to a website called DietBet, and I was immediately intrigued.

DietBet is a 4-week program, where participants need to lose 4% of their body weight (or more) in order to get any of the “pot.” You can create your own challenge, or join someone else’s, and pay a certain sum of money to participate. For instance, the one I joined was $25. And let me tell you, I’m more motivated than ever before to lose weight, even just to get back my $25.

Whenever a new person enters your group, the pot rises. I was looking at the top game, and it’s at almost $9,000. I wouldn’t mind being part of that group! When the date arrives for the contest to begin, you have to take two photos  – one full length photo of you on a scale in “airport security” attire, and one of the scale, the number on it, and a piece of paper with a weigh-in word, to prove it’s actually you. I was wondering how they would do this, actually, and it seems like they’ve got it under control! These photos are kept private, and you don’t have to share your weight with the others in the competition.

During the competition, you can post photos, write comments, and just interact with others in the game. There is also an iPhone app companion for the game, which I thought was nice.  Starting on the last day of the competition, you have 48 hours to “weigh out”

I really believe that money is a great motivator for just about anything, and I’m interested to see if I actually have any success using this site. (PS, if you want to join in, my group starts on April 29th. The more the merrier!)

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April 19, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: Apple  Gadgets  Health Care  Health Games  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Patient Home Monitoring  Social Networking Health
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BabyTime Connects Moms to Babies in NICU

Nothing pulls at my heart strings more than stories of babies in the NICU. And this story did just that.

At Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, mothers who aren’t able to see their babies who were whisked away to the NICU can now see them a little bit sooner. The hospital is using FaceTime, the free, video chat app that iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches have, to connect new moms to their sweet little ones. A lot of the time, these mother’s aren’t able to go and be with their baby’s in the NICU for awhile, or even the baby is sick enough, they have to be held in isolation. On the flipside, sometimes a mother may be too weak or ill after delivery to be with her baby. Using this simple app helps make this hard situation a little easier.

The hospital calls this “BabyTime,” and it has been used with a small group of moms who delivered via C-section, though they have plans to have mothers who had a traditional delivery. In the article, Yvonne Kidder, a nurse at Cedars-Sinai, said that sometimes it can take between 2 and 3 days before a mom can see her baby, and that they want to “cut that down to 2-3 hours.” The hospital now has guidelines that allow for new moms to have access to BabyTime at least once time during a nursing shift, which lasts 12 hours.

My son was healthy when he was born, and I was able to see him about 10 minutes after birth. I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to have had him taken away to the NICU, and not been able to see him for who knows how long. I think it’s wonderful that this hospital is seeing the benefit of using technology to connect moms with their NICU babies, and I hope other hospitals will follow suit. Babies can recognize their mother’s voice right out of the womb, and I imagine that hearing the voice of their mother while in a vulnerable state has got to help in some way!

Another thing I love about this is that it shows that mHealth doesn’t have to be complicated. Sure, there is a lot of mHealth apps and technology out there, and some of it is not-so-user friendly. But I love seeing existing mobile technology, that most know how to use, being used in new and innovative ways.

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April 15, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: Apple  Health Care  Healthcare IT  iPad  iPhone  Medical Devices  mHealth  Smart Phones
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FitBit API and Other Healthcare APIs

I’ve long been a big fan of APIs in technology. It’s really powerful to open up your software so that outside developers can create really cool applications on top of your software. Think where Twitter would be today if it weren’t for their API. Most of the best Twitter clients were not built by Twitter. That’s just one simple example.

With that in mind, I was interested to see how the FitBit API was doing in its development. It’s been around for a couple years, so my hope was that I’d find a mature API with some good documentation and most importantly a strong developer community around it.

It seems like Fitbit has made it really easy to sign up and start using their API. That’s a good thing. Far too many in healthcare have an API, but they put up these enormous barriers for developers to start using it. When you’re dealing with PHI, you do have to take a serious approach to access, but the intent should be to create as many of those trusted API relationships as possible.

Next, I took a look at the Fitbit API documentation. Most of you won’t want to look at the API documentation since you’re not a developer. However, if you look at this Fitbit API Explorer page, you’ll get a good view of what functions are possible with the Fitbit API. They have a set of Ruby, PHP, and .Net Client libraries which is great (Although they’re not directly developed or supported by Fitbit). I do wish they had a really good sample app that uses their API. I’ve found a great sample application is incredibly valuable to developers that want to start using that API.

Finally, I took a look at the . I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t more activity here. It does seem that the questions in the group do get eventually answered, but I’d have like to see a bigger Fitbit presence in the forum. The most active threads are the feature requests and announcements threads which isn’t too much of a surprise. There were only 15-20 active threads in April.

All in all, it looks like Fitbit has created a pretty solid API. I could see myself using it for a future project.

I’m interested to know what other APIs you’ve found in healthcare. What other healthcare companies are putting out really good APIs? Have you used the Fitbit API? What was your experience? Is it reliable? What are the best apps in healthcare that leverage someone’s API?

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April 12, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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Fujitsu Smartphone to Measure Vitals

There’s a revolution in health sensors that are coming to the smartphone world. This was first seen when the Samsung phones decided to include sensors to measure the temperature and humidity of your location.

It looks like Fujitsu is ready to launch a new smartphone that measures your vital health information using you smartphone camera. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

[Fujitsu] have just announced plan to begin including health tracking technology into their future smartphones. This tech would be able to figure out your heart rate just by looking at your face. Basically, you stick your mug in front of the camera and the phone does the rest. How in the world does it do this? Subtle changes in facial blood flow are not detectable by the human eye but are able to be seen by computers. Lo and behold, smartphones are actually computers.

I first saw this technology in action at the Connected Health Summit in Boston a couple years ago. It’s really amazing monitoring technology using just your smartphone camera. It’s a beautiful thing since you don’t need a wristband, armband, clip on, etc. You just need the smartphone that you’re carrying around already.

I wonder if this monitoring technology is just an app that can work with almost any hardware or if it will need a specific camera to work right. It would be great if it’s just an app, because then this could work for any smartphone.

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April 10, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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The Smartphone Physical – Is It Possible?

Sometimes I mention that, with all of the mHealth apps and technology that is being developed, there may come a day that we won’t have to leave our homes to see the doctor. Well, that day may be sooner than I thought.

I just read this article, about how Johns Hopkins’ student, Shiv Gaglani and a team of other physicians-to-be, will be doing a “smartphone physical” demo at TEDMED 2013 (Note: John Lynn will be at TEDMED if anyone is interested in meeting him there). The physicals will include a variety of different tools and measurements, and feature a variety of popular mHealth devices. Some of the items that will be used include:

  • an iHealth scale
  • a digital stethoscope from ThinkLabs
  • CellScope phone case

(to see the comprehensive list, visit the article I linked to above.)

Gaglani believes that these smartphone physicals will be more efficient, and help patients to understand their bodies and health a little more:

For example, thanks to the AliveCor Heart Monitor, it has never been easier to get a one-lead ECG reading. Similarly, the Withings and iHealth blood pressure cuffs are plug-and-play so a clinician doesn’t have to fumble around with both a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer to assess whether her patient is hypersensitive.

The article also mentions that Gaglani believes that these types of exams will help immensely with data collection. It sounds like, if all goes according to plan, the data could immediately be uploaded to a practice’s EMR. This type of device connectivity is an important part to the future of Telehealth.

For someone who is healthy, and doesn’t necessarily want or need a heavily physician-involved physical, this is could be really great. I could see it saving a lot of time and effort that is involved with going to the doctor. While it seems like there will probably a lot of logistics to be sorted out, it’s need to see something like this in the works. What do you think — would you want to participate in a smartphone physical? Does it seem reliable enough to replace having a physician perform the physical themselves?

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April 8, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Patient Home Monitoring
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Tracking Health Infographic

The people at Pathfinder Software have put together an infographic on Health Tracking. The data for their infographic comes from a Pew Research Study. It highlights something I’ve discussed much before as far as those with chronic conditions tracking their health versus healthy patients. There’s a big difference in those two groups. I was also intrigued by the data sharing numbers. I’d like to know the exact question asked, but those patients with no conditions shared a lot more than I thought they would with their doctor.

Here’s the infographic:
Infographic_Tracking_Final

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April 5, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT
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