Designing Future Healthcare

Dr. Eric Topol, just came out with the book- “The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands”. If you are interested in how healthcare is changing (for better or worse) in the coming years this book is a must read.

The Patient Will See You Now  empowers its’ readers to take charge and improve their own health, and is chock full references and specific examples of how medicine is affected by technology.  There are amazing tech advances that are lowering healthcare costs and making procedures much better and less invasive.

Dr. Topol explains why the stethoscope should be replaced by a smartphone, and the benefits of knowing your own personalized GIS. Smartphones can capture blood pressure, heart rhythm, respiratory rate, oxygen concentration, galvanic skin response, body temperature, eye pressure, blood glucose, brain waves, intracranial pressure, muscle movements and much more.  Smart phones can be enabled to diagnose certain cancers through patient’s breath. Nano chips, pocket devices for ultrasound and x-rays (cheaper and less radiation), genome sequencing (cheaper and better too)…

It explains topics like “Open Access” in Medicine. Open Access medicine speeds up finding cures and courses of treatment, lowers costs, and improves patient treatment and outcomes.

For all the benefits listed, the book also delves into the problems (and some solutions) associated with each new technology such as privacy problems associated with “Open Access” Medicine.

This book brings up a treasure trove of problems that will need to be solved in order to make the tech work best for people.

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Animating for Impact

Read Rachel Nebor’s Article “Web Animation at Work” if you’d like to see ways animation indicates:

• Causality
• Feedback
• Relationships
• Progression
• Physics
• Transition

Be sure to follow Rachel’s hyperlinks. Even her 404 is entertaining.

Olivia Huynh has created some animation that is outstanding.  Compelling stories and great sounds and music really make her animation shine.

Teaching and Learning

Check out Adobe Education Exchange if you’d like to learn more about all things digital creation! Adobe’s Education Exchange, known by the instructors as “edex” is great resource for teachers, instructional designers and anyone who wants to create or communicate most effectively.

I’m currently taking a class that combines self-paced lectures and live online meetings. Students are introduced to and encouraged to use many online collaboration tools like edex and Behance as well as Twitter and Facebook. There are more than 3000 students all over the world taking this course! In order to turn in assignments for credit each student must review three other students work. It’s great seeing work from people with totally different perspectives.

So far, I’ve learned and tried many ways to create slide shows, videos and interactive digital publications such as ebooks. We use Adobe products such as Photoshop, Premiere, InDesign as well as other apps and tools like 30Hands, Animoto, Adobe Voice, Adobe Clip, Video Scribe.  I’ve also gotten much faster in Photoshop now that I am using keyboard shortcuts.

Prototyping Google X Style

Tom Chi gave a great talk, “Rapid Prototyping X, Methods and Debugs”, at the Dec 2014 Hack.Summitt about inventing Google Glass. He described the method to the madness (laser projected keyboards, real-time 3-d mapping, and brain control) that went into creating Google Glass while he was head of product experience at Google.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin challenged the Google X group: “What would it take to have google in your brain?”  The team came up with prototypes to test in hours instead of months.

The Google X Team

1. Knew the difference between guessing and direct experience and tested their ideas out.
2. Kept research broad, fast and shallow -15 hardware prototypes every week for 10 weeks.
3. Found “stars” stand out experiences and constellations (they were shooting for the moon after all).

Tom spoke about two main situations that you can use google glass

1. ambient awareness
2. real-time information while on task – technician, surgeon, anesthesiologist, factory worker, wall street trader

For more Tom Chi, watch Tom’s TED Talk.  See the Google Glass Development website.  Wikipedia on Google X Projects.