Smartphones To Measure Radiation Exposure

Japanese phone company is developing a smartphone with a "jacket" to measure radiation levels. It can also check your body fat and even bad breath.

What are some of your favorite innovative uses of smartphones?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15023061

Are you a Digital Native or a Digital Immigrant?

If you are reading this blog, you probably at least speak the ‘digital native language’. A digital native is someone who grew up in the digital age surrounded by digital technology, whereas a digital immigrant came upon digital technology later in life. These terms were coined by Marc Prensky, an author and game designer in the areas of education and learning. He argues that today’s learners are different and that this difference has serious implications for education. Further, he states “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”. His classic article Digital Native, Digital Immigrants is from 2001, but I think it is still relevant today.

Do you think these terms are accurate? Should there be another category, such as assimilated digital immigrant? Do you think this concept is just part of the generation gap? Or is it something more?

Medify tries to bring medical literature to the layman

cnet has a short article about Medify, a website that indexes Medline and other health-related databases and provides a search interface intended for the layperson trying to diagnose themselves.

Medify analyzes free-form text from abstracts of articles in medical journals, and lets you filter them by patient type (gender or age, for example). Charts show you which studies are most relevant for your group, and also which are newest. The graphical language of Medify's charts is unique, but quickly learned.

I went to the website and put in "sleep" as a symptom.  Filtering the topic by age and gender was pretty straightforward.  However, filtering by concomitant symptoms seemed to get pretty technical pretty fast ("Cheynes-Stokes Respirations" anyone?)


Take a look and tell me what you think.   Is this a useful tool for persons who don't have a health-care background?

Rite Aid rolls out in-store virtual doctor visits

Some Detroit Rite Aid stores are getting kiosks that allow patients to interact in real time with physicians and nurses.

With Rite Aid's face-to-face consultations over the Internet, customers can see and speak directly to doctors who are able to discuss symptoms, provide guidance, diagnose and prescribe certain medications. Customers can also interact with OptumHealth nurses, who are able to offer basic health care education, information on common acute issues and assistance in identifying appropriate provider options for care.

The full story is over at Computerworld.

FDA Asked to Approve Video Game for Treatment of Schizophrenia

New Scientist has a short article about the makers of of a cognitive training game who are seeking FDA approval to market the game as therapy.

Brain Plasticity has been fine-tuning a game to help people with schizophrenia improve the deficits in attention and memory that are often associated with the disorder.

This appears to be a new regulatory area for the FDA and there is some question as to whether "treatments" like this should undergo full approval process or if the FDA should simply develop guidelines to help consumers  pick between what might be effective and what might not.

How to make videoconferencing on your iPad HIPAA-compliant

ZDNet has a short article that asks the question "Is FaceTime HIPAA-compliant?"  


Apparently, the entire FaceTime stream is encrypted and HIPAA-compliant.   The only weak link would be how the person with the iPad connects wirelessly to the Internet.

iPad supports WPA2 Enterprise to provide authenticated access to your enterprise wireless network. WPA2 Enterprise uses 128-bit AES encryption, giving users the highest level of assurance that their data will remain protected when they send and receive communications over a Wi-Fi network connection. 

I'm not sure how practical this is at this time, but it's an interesting fact to keep in the back of your mind.

Is plagiarism detection software helping students plagiarize?

I've not had much experience using plagiarism-detecting software.   The types of assignments we have our students do results in too many false-positives (there's only so many ways of saying "Take on an empty stomach").


David E. Herrington has an essay on his blog where he reflects on the ethics of plagiarism-detecting software.  He makes an interesting observation:

...Turnitin offers another product called WriteCheck that allows students to “check [their] work against the same database as Turnitin.”  .... WriteCheck warned me that “a significant amount of this paper is unoriginal” and advised me to revise it.  After a few hours of right-clicking and scrambling, I resubmitted it and WriteCheck said it was okay, being cleansed of easily recognizable plagiarism.

Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection.  It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.

It takes a little while to get to that part of the essay, but it's an interesting read overall.

Think You're An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely

This isn't really "tech", but my School is preparing their ACPE self-study and I thought this was interesting.

There's an article and an audio file over at NPR's Health Blog where they summarize some of the recent controversy over "learning styles".

We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement.But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths?  Several psychologists say education could use some "evidence-based" teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use "evidence-based medicine."

Are we looking at the pedagogical equivalent of the CAST Trial?  Is what "made sense" for years actually the wrong thing to do?

SmartPhones Can't Cure Acne

IT World is reporting that the FTC has ruled that smartphone apps can't cure acne.

Both apps promised treatment for acne through colored lights emitted from mobile device screens. The app marketers instructed users to hold the screen next to the area of affected skin for a few minutes each day.

But don't worry.  Acne remedies based on homeopathy are still legal.

Smart Phones Help Manage Chronic Illness

Technology Review has an article about connecting smart phones to medical monitors.  

Their apps interface wirelessly with medical devices—including a blood-pressure monitor and a blood-sugar monitor—and offer suggestions based on the readings. They found that people using the programs lowered their blood pressure and were more vigilant about monitoring and testing their blood sugar.

Gimmick or wave of the future?

JiffPad Creates Personalized Medical Diagrams Via iPad

There's a report at TechCrunch about JiffPad, an app for facilitating communication between health professionals and patients.

The app provides a set of pre-rendered medical diagrams that can be linked together into digital narratives for explaining medical concepts to patients visually.  The presentation can also be sent to them electronically so the patients can share it with their family or caregivers.

While the app seems to primarily focus on anatomical concepts, other images can be loaded into the program and incorporated into presentations.

It sounds like there might be some promise in using this app to explain medication mechanism-of-actions to patients. 

Leveraging Pharmacy Practice via Technology

There is a short article at Pharmacy Practice News  that is structured around a series of tweets that went out during the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Summer Meeting in Denver.

“Mobile information appliances offer the greatest opportunity for decision support using the best science possible in the practice of pharmacy and in the health care management decisions for patients,” said Mr. Felkey. Pointing to the wide range of software available for pharmacy, he quipped, “There is an app for that!”

Free registration for the site is required to access the article.

How Much Would You Pay for the Amazon's Version of Netflix?

The rumors have surfaced that Amazon is working on a service that would offer its clients access to a library of books for a fixed monthly fee. It appears that a lot of publishers are quite unhappy about this, as a result the details of this project (and its progress) are quite scarce. It has been mentioned that Amazon might set a high fee and/or limit number of books that one can borrow.

What are your thoughts about such service? How much (maximum) would you pay for it? Do you believe it would be popular among your students?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/amazon-kindle-future-books-publishing-authors-jk-rowling/story?id=14502605

Matternet delivers drugs by robocopter

On cnet there is a story about a company that is proposing using cheap, autonomous flying drones to deliver medications to remote locations.

The "quadrocoptors" have a range of about 10 km when carrying a 2 kg load.

Matternet is trying to create, essentially, a modern, long-distance version of the pneumatic tubes that hospitals use to shuttle samples and papers around.

Seems like there are a lot of logistical problems to solve, but  apparently the Dominican Republic is interested enough to fund a pilot project (no pun intended). 

BidRx: Ebay for Prescriptions?

Here's a technology-related topic for those who teach marketing to pharmacy students:

At Lifehacker there is a discussion of BidRx, a website that allows patients to enter the details of their prescription and then will try to find them the lowest price from several competing pharmacies.

To use BidRx, you'll need your prescription from your doctor or other licensed prescriber. You can mail this in to the pharmacy that "wins" your bid or, depending on the drug (and your state laws), fax it in. Most of the pharmacies listed with BidRx are small ones around the country, but you may find one nearby where you can pick up your medicine in person.

There's some discussion in the comments about the problems of patients having one medication filled at one pharmacy, a second medication filled at another, etc. without a pharmacist being able to review their entire profile.    A pharmacist there is making a good effort to explain to the rest of the group why this is potentially dangerous.

Networked Student

Here is a video that I have stumbled upon looking for interesting topics to share with this group. It is not new, but the information is quite useful and provides good frame of reference for any of the educators who wish to better incorporate social media into their courses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwM4ieFOotA&feature=player_embedded

Apple hires Pfizer employees to block counterfeit iPhones

Not really having anything to do with educational technology, but this story has an interesting pharmaceutical tie-in.

There are reports that Apple has recruited security team members from Pfizer to assist in tracking down and stopping illegal counterfeiting of iPhones and iPods in China.

Why Pfizer?   Because of Viagra.

Selling counterfeit Viagra tablets in China is a big business and the Pfizer people understand how the underground market (and the Chinese judicial system) works. 

Apple.   Think Different.

What's the best application for taking notes?

Over at Lifehacker they are taking votes on the best apps to take notes and organize thoughts.

The candidates are

1. Evernote
2. Springpad
3. MS One Note
4. SimpleNote
5. Paper and pencil

I know which one I prefer.   What do you like to use?

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores

The New York Times has an article about the disappointing lack of improvement in standardized test scores despite significant investments in classroom technology.

To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This article has to do with K-12, but is the same true in higher education?