[Press release] A Phone so Smart, it Sniffs out Disease

From the 2 February 2015 American Technion Society press release

A research consortium headed by Professor Hossam Haick of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is developing a product that, when coupled with a smartphone, will be able to screen the user’s breath for early detection of life-threatening diseases.

Funded by a grant from the European Commission, the SNIFFPHONE project will link Prof. Haick’s acclaimed breathalyzer screening technology to the smartphone to provide non-invasive, fast and cheap disease detection. It will work by using micro- and nano-sensors that read exhaled breath and then transfer the information through the attached mobile phone to an information-processing system for interpretation. The data is then assessed and disease diagnosis and other details are ascertained.

The technology is supported by a recent €6 million (US$6.8 million) grant to the consortium to expand the “electronic nose” breathalyzer technology that Prof. Haick has been developing since he joined the Technion in 2006. That technology can identify individuals from the general population who have a higher likelihood for contracting a specific disease, and treat them in advance or at an early stage.

The entities participating in the winning consortium include Siemens; universities and research institutes from Germany, Austria, Finland, Ireland and Latvia; and Israeli company NanoVation-GS Israel. NanoVation-GS is a Technion spin-off headed by Dr. Gregory Shuster and Sagi Gliksman, who are both graduates of Prof. Haick’s laboratory. Prof. Haick serves as Chief Scientific Officer.

“The SNIFFPHONE is a winning solution. It will be made tinier and cheaper than disease detection solutions currently, consume little power, and most importantly, it will enable immediate and early diagnosis that is both accurate and non-invasive,” says Prof. Haick. “Early diagnosis can save lives, particularly in life-threatening diseases such as cancer.”

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BBC – Future – Should we diagnose rare diseases with smartphones?

English: Biosafety level 4 hazmat suit: researcher is working with the Ebola virus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BBC – Future – Should we diagnose rare diseases with smartphones?.

From the 17 October 2014 BBC article

s fear of the Ebola virus escalates, Eric Topol thinks that we’re missing an important weapon. And you just need to reach into your pocket to find it. “Most communicable diseases can be diagnosed with a smartphone,” he says. “Rather than putting people into quarantine for three weeks – how about seeing if they harbour it in their blood?” A quicker response could also help prevent mistakes, such as the patient in Dallas who was sent home from hospital with a high fever, only to later die from the infection.

It’s a provocative claim, but Topol is not shy about calling for a revolution in the way we deal with Ebola – or any other health issue for that matter. A professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute in California, his last book heralded “the creative destruction of medicine” through new technology. Smartphones are already helping to do away with many of the least pleasant aspects of sickness – including the long hospital visits and agonising wait for treatment. An easier way to diagnose Ebola is just one example of these sweeping changes.

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How Smartphones Could Impact Public Health

(Chart via Pew.)Smartphone owners now outnumber regular cell phone owners for the first time, according to a new study.

From the March 3, 2012 article in the Boston Globe

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This smartphone proliferation has tremendous potential from a public health perspective. When Ispoke with Frank Moss at Bluefin Labs for the story, he described a day when doctors would simultaneously prescribe medicine with an app to help patients better monitor their care (you can read more of Moss’s ideas about mobile health in his New York Times op-ed). When you consider that smartphone penetration is already higher in African American and Latino communities (49 percent in each group vs. a national average of 46 percent) and that these two groups are historically disadvantaged when it comes to accessing health care (just browse the February headline roundup from the Kaiser Family Foundation for examples of these disparities), it would be revolutionary to begin targeting health care apps and devices to these populations.

When we consider looking that the gadgets being pushed into the marketplace to help us monitor our health (many of which I tried while reporting the story) we forget that they’re all targeting ”fairly affluent people,” says Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist who often blogs about public health at Health Populi. “When we look at the burden of chronic disease, it’s the African Americans and Latinos, the poor and less-educated, and very old or very young that don’t have access to healthy food or safe places. These populations have spent as much money on their mobile phones [as the rest of the country], but the platform technology hasn’t penetrated into poor urban areas.”

Sarasohn-Kahn hopes that Medicaid will start developing applications to target these populations, and points to the recent move by a former CDC scientist to develop an asthma inhaler outfitted with GPS and Wifi enabled sensors. When distributed in urban populations, the inhalers allow the doctors to better track their patients, and allow epidemiologists to learn more about the health of these groups. Right now, the smartphones are spreading at a rapid clip through the country. We just need to be smart enough to know how to help them nudge us all toward better health….

Five Ways mHealth Can Decrease Hospital Readmissions by David Lee Scher, MD

Five Ways mHealth Can Decrease Hospital Readmissions   by Dr. David Lee Scher

From the column…

Patients who are discharged from the hospital after a heart attack, congestive heart failure, or pneumonia have high rates of short-term readmissions. As per a provision in the Affordable Care Act, a Medicare patient with one of these diagnoses who is readmitted within 30 days for the same will trigger a denial of reimbursement for the subsequent admission.  There are many things which need to change to limit these events, though not all readmissions can be prevented, as nothing in medicine is absolute.  Identification and intensive interventions (inpatient and post-discharge) with high risk patients, better communication/care coordination, discharge processes, and patient education have been shown to produce results.  I would make a case for mHealth to become an integral part of all these components of a multi-faceted solution . here are a few ways that mHealth may be incorporated in the process:

1. The use of bioinformatics to determine the patient’s low, moderate, or high risk of readmission can be put into a hospital app to be shared among members of a multidisciplinary transitional team, which will formulate a discharge and post-discharge plan based on this data, while rounding on the patient daily….

...Click here to read the entire article

Related articles

• A Step on a Scale Helps Keep Heart Patients at Home – Hospital Readmission Rates Plummet Thanks to Innovative Program (prweb.com)
• The Quiet Health-Care Revolution (Atlantic Monthly)

  While legislators talk about “bending the cost curve,” one company serving Medicare patients has discovered how to provide better care at lower cost—with wireless scales, free transportation, regular toenail trimmings, and doctors who put the patient first.

• 5 Reasons Physicians Will Love Mobile Health (engagingthepatient.com)
• mHealth Moving Fast, Raising Hope, And Questions (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• How hospitals can avoid readmissions (kevinmd.com)
• IMSS: Most hospitals still developing mobile policies (MobileHealth News)
• Physicians in Scotland use iPhone 4 and Skype to remotely manage lung and pleural ultrasound (iMedical Apps, Dec 2011)
• UK patients able to get health advice via free iPhone medical app, review of NHS Direct app (iMedical Apps, Dec 2011)

 

Related Resources

• Get Mobilized! An introduction to mobile resources and tools in health sciences libraries (Medical Library Association)

  Archived 2011 online class including “lecture notes”, resources, class discussions, and related slides/videos

• Health Apps (in Health and Medical News and Resources selected by Janice Flahiff)
  a short list of information and tracking apps derived from the above Get Mobilized class

Ten Facts about Mobile Broadband

Great summary by Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director, Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Here’s just one of the facts… (others topics  include  their outnumbering of personal computers next year, increase in overall use by Americans, job creation, reshaping of education, political engagement, public safety, and disparity reduction)

 

7. Mobile Helps Patients and Health Care Providers

Health care today is dominated by physicians, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, and government agencies. Patients seek to navigate their health care by moving across a variety of providers, ordering prescription drugs from pharmacies, and seeking reimbursement from either public or private insurance plans. They spend hours connecting the dots and working out the best health care for themselves and their families.

Imagine a different system where, with the aid of the Internet, electronic medical records, and smartphones, the patient is in charge.[xviii] People monitor their own weight, blood pressure, pulse, and sugar levels, and send test results via remote devices to health care providers. Patients store their medical records online and have access regardless of where they are in the United States or around the world. They get personalized feedback via e-mail and reminders when they gain weight, have an uptick on their cholesterol levels, don’t take their medicine, or have high blood pressure. Social networking sites provide discussion forums and the benefit of collective experience from other people suffering similar problems. Patients take responsibility for their routine health care and rely on physicians and hospitals for more serious medical conditions.

This system is not a futuristic vision, but is within our grasp. It would cut costs by reducing professional responsibility for routine tasks and record-keeping, while also making it possible for patients to receive higher quality care and be more satisfied with the end-result. The technologies for this kind of system transformation currently are available through cell phones, mobile broadband, remote monitoring devices, video conferencing, and the Internet.

Smartphones offer advanced features such as mobile e-mail, web browsing, and wireless communications. The sophistication of these devices has spawned a variety of new medical applications that help doctors and patients stay in touch and monitor health care needs.

For example, there is a mobile application that allows physicians to get test results on their mobile device. They can look at blood pressure records over time, see an electro-cardiogram, or monitor a fetal heart rate. AirStrip Technologies markets an application that makes it possible for obstetricians remotely to monitor the heart rates of fetuses and expecting mothers. This allows them to detect conditions that are placing either at risk.

Work by Prgomet and colleagues has found that mobile handhelds have positive impacts on hospital physician work practices and patient care.  When equipped with such devices, researchers discovered benefits in terms of “rapid response, error prevention, and data management and accessibility”.[xix]  These benefits were especially profound in emergency room settings where time is of the essence in treating patients.

Mobile devices offer help for developing nations.  A majority of sub-Saharan Africa residents are served by cellphones with texting capabilities.  A non-profit organization called Medic Mobile seeks to use text messaging in that part of the world to track epidemics and help disaster relief personnel find those in need.[xx]

These applications make doctors more efficient because they don’t have to be in the physical presence of a patient to judge his or her condition. Digital technology allows people to overcome the limitations of geography in health care and access information at a distance. This makes it possible for patients to get a second opinion by sending that person relevant medical tests. If a personal conference is required, doctors can use video conferencing to speak to patients located in another locale.

Related Resources

• Get Mobilized! An introduction to mobile resources and tools in health sciences libraries (Medical Library Association)

  Archived 2011 online class including “lecture notes”, resources, class discussions, and related slides/videos

• Health Apps (in Health and Medical News and Resources selected by Janice Flahiff)
  a short list of information and tracking apps derived from the above Get Mobilized class

Related articles

• From DIY Diagnostic Tests to Mobile Health Competitions (scienceroll.com)
• mHealth: Seemingly Stuck in Neutral (chilmarkresearch.com)
• mHealth Moving Fast, Raising Hope, And Questions (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Mobile health: Hallelujah or bah humbug? (finance.fortune.cnn.com)
• mHealth Summit 2011 – Videos Available (imianews.wordpress.com)
• mHealth Moving Fast, Raising Hope, And Questions (egmnblog.wordpress.com)
• Sensei, Inc. Presenting at mHealth Summit (prweb.com)
• Zeo Sleep Monitor CEO at the 2011 mHealth Summit (medgadget.com)

FDA Proposes Health ‘App’ Guidelines

From the press release

Want to know how a medication might affect your breast milk? Got a question about a disability, aging, mental health?

There’s an app for all that—and a whole lot more.

The variety and availability of smartphone applications—or apps—have exploded in recent years as multi-tasking consumers increasingly use their phones to keep up with the latest on news, finance, and health. Apple says its iPhone App Store has more than 350,000 apps, and Android, BlackBerry, Windows, and other smartphones account for tens of thousands more. With so many apps on the market, it’s no wonder the number of health care related apps has also spiraled.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now proposing guidelines that outline the small number of mobile apps the agency plans to oversee—medical apps that could present a risk to patients if the apps don’t work as intended.  The proposed guidelines were posted on the Federal Register website Thursday.

Consumers may weigh-in on the guidelines during a public comment period that ends Oct. 19

For more information, visit FDA’s Mobile Medical Apps page.

FDA policy advisor Bakul Patel says some of the new mobile apps are designed to help consumers manage their own health and wellness—like the National Institutes of Health’s LactMed app, which gives nursing mothers information about the effects of medicines on breast milk and nursing infants.

Other apps are aimed at helping health care providers improve and facilitate patient care—like the Radiation Emergency Medical Management (REMM) app, which gives health care providers guidance on diagnosing and treating radiation injuries. There are even apps to aid diagnosis of rashes and heart irregularities.

FDA has already cleared a handful of mobile medical apps used by health care professionals, such as a smartphone-based ultrasound and an application for iPhones and iPads that allows doctors to view medical images and X-rays.

There’s an app for that!

“There are advantages to using medical apps, but consumers and health care professionals should have a balanced awareness of the benefits and risks,” Patel says.

Apps can give consumers valuable health information in seconds and are opening innovative ways for technology to improve health care, Patel says. However, the small group of mobile medical apps FDA proposes to oversee present a potential risk—these apps may impact how a currently regulated medical device (such as an ultrasound) performs, he adds.

FDA is proposing to oversee mobile medical apps that:

• Are used as an accessory to an FDA-regulated medical device. For example, an app could enable a health care professional to view medical images on an iPad and make a diagnosis;
• Transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device. For example, an app that turns a smartphone into an electrocardiography, or ECG, machine to detect abnormal heart rhythms or determine if a patient is experiencing a heart attack.

If you want to provide input on FDA’s proposal, you can submit your comment online athttp://www.regulations.gov/ or in writing to: Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305), Food and Drug Administration, 5630 Fishers Lane, Rm. 1061, Rockville, MD  20852.

“We want to hear from as many consumers, advocacy groups, health care professionals, and software creators and distributors as possible to help us finalize the proposed guidelines,” Patel says.

This article appears on FDA’s Consumer Updates page, which features the latest on all FDA-regulated products.

Posted July 19, 2011

 

Please Note Well!—At this time it seems that consumer health apps (as Mobile MedlinePlus) will not be covered in the regulations.

http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/Guidanc…

Using Your Smartphone to Lose Weight (and other interesting things you can do with a smartphone)

Image via Wikipedia

From the May 5, 2011  Cornflower blog item (The Blog of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Greater Midwest Region)

Today in Chicago, it is currently 48 degrees at 10:00 am.  Not exactly beach weather.  However, it will be soon time to take off those winter jackets and replace it with t-shirts and suntan lotion.  So, did you know you can use your smartphone to help you lose weight? (Not saying you need it! You look marvelous!) Duke University researchers are using Android smartphones and wireless weight scales for a weight loss study.  It’s not just that you connect with a scale wirelessly and it adds your weight to a chart on your phone; the app on your smartphone will keep track of your weight and depending how it is trending, send you messages.  Hopefully they aren’t messages like “lay off the cookies, Max!” Because I love cookies too much.  Anyway.  This article came out a few days ago and you may find it interesting: http://www.imedicalapps.com/2011/04/duke-researchers-android-phones-bluetooth-weight-scale/.

Sort of on the same wavelength about getting messages from your phone – there are a growing number of services that will communicate with you to remind you of appointments, to take medicines, or in the case above, maybe even give encouragement.  Some examples:

• Text4Baby (especially with Mother’s Day just around the corner!), http://text4baby.org/
  • Indiana University Health, Texting Teen Moms Proves to be a Convenient Source for Support
• Weight Management Text Messaging, http://www.muschealth.com/weightlosstools/weightmessage.htm
• CDC – Mobile at CDC, http://www.cdc.gov/mobile/
• Summa Health System (OH)- Baby’s First Text Message, http://www.summahealth.org/common/templates/article.asp?ID=18612
• ER Wait Times (IL), http://www.edward.org/body.cfm?id=1443 and one from CA, http://blog.cep.com/bid/38007/Hospital-launches-emergency-department-text-messaging-program

There is a Health Literacy Out Loud Podcast on this topic: http://www.healthliteracyoutloud.com/2011/04/26/health-literacy-out-loud-57-texting-important-health-messages/

Other developments:

• In Denver, Co, the hospital group Denver Health has teamed up with Microsoft and EMC on a project to send patients text message reminders about upcoming appointments in a diabetes program that aimed to help patients better self manage their condition.  They ask patients to text in their daily glucose readings.  They hope that this will improve condition management, reduce admission rates and reduce costs.  Read more about this project.
• Getting teens and tweens to be more complaint with eczema treatments with texting: http://www.skincarephysicians.com/eczemanet/texting.html

For more clinical research see the following:

• Text messaging for enhancement of testing and treatment for tuberculosis, human immunodeficiency virus, and syphilis: a survey of attitudes toward cellular phones and healthcare.
• Assessing the effectiveness of text messages as appointment reminders in a pediatric dental setting.
• Content of text messaging immunization reminders: What low-income parents want to know.

There’s more where these came from in PubMed.

What is your organization doing with mobile technologies? Does your hospital have ER wait times available via a mobile device? What about appointment reminders?

P.S. Don’t forget about the NLM “Show Off Your Apps” Contest! http://challenge.gov/NIH/132-nlm-show-off-your-apps-innovative-uses-of-nlm-information

P.P.S. (or is it P.S.S.?) Don’t forget about all of the mobile sites and apps available already from the NLM: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mobile/