Mobile health in Workshop of the Precision Medicine Initiative

A lot of big names in academia have attended NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative. Their Workshop of the Precision Medicine Initiative and Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director also involves a few select presentations from industry. This has implications in behavioral health as you can see: Saw this in the POLITICO Morning eHealth newsletter today: The NIH will wrap up a Precision Medicine Initiative workshop today in Santa Clara. The event is focusing on mobile and personal technologies. (The agenda: http://1.usa.gov/1g1zJhv) Some notes from Monday: “24/7 sensing from smartphones is here, now,” said Dartmouth College computer scientist Andrew Campbell, in describing his work. Using persistent smartphone sensing data, he said, he can predict students’ GPA within seventeen hundredths of a grade point, and can make a reasonably strong guess about whether a student is depressed or not. – Bonnie Spring, of Northwestern, said that when mixing social networks and wearables, friendship online can predict later success. If a user trying on online communities and wearables to lose weight makes a friend, they’re about 90% to stick around for sixth months, and are more likely to lose weight. But it’s hard to stimulate these relationships. “We’ve only got about 10% of people benefitting,” she...

Mayo Clinic THINK BIG Challenge

A new contest from Mayo Clinic Innovation & Mayo Clinic Ventures with healthcare just came out. Categories involve wellness, smoking/alcohol cessation, and behavior modification Apply here at http://thinkbig2015.istart.org . Deadline is Aug 15, 2015.  h/t Arshya Vahabzadeh. Got a great idea to improve health or health care? Help make your dream a reality with the Mayo Clinic THINK BIG Challenge, sponsored by Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Mayo Clinic Ventures and AVIA. Entrepreneurs will compete for a total of $100,000 in awards. In addition, Mayo Clinic experts will guide winners for a year as they develop their concepts for market.   This year’s Mayo Clinic THINK BIG Challenge themes are: • Got Health?  This challenge will focus on healthy people staying healthy and will explore areas such as eating healthy, monitoring risk factors and daily exercise. • I am NOT my Disease. This challenge will tackle the presumption that people are defined by their disease and will explore areas such as access to health data, health literacy and behavior modification     Application deadline for the Mayo Clinic THINK BIG Challenge is August 15,...

Partners HealthCare’s Connected Health tech pitch contest for detecting emotions

From the original website: “All innovators welcome! This is an open call to any clinician or clinician-in-training anywhere in the world to submit ideas to use emotion-sensing technologies to improve healthcare. Applications can be in any setting, from the clinic to the classroom to the patient’s home or anywhere else the technology can be applied to improve healthcare.” Boston Globe news...