IBM and Apple monitor our health

We first reported IBM and Apple’s JV partnership in our blog of 18th July 2014 with AppleCare for enterprises.

The boom in fitness trackers and health apps has prompted the tech giants to make commercial inroads on the opportunities arising from analytic technologies.  IBM has set up a new health unit to create “a secure, cloud-based data sharing hub” as part of their “employee health and wellness management solutions” with the aim that it will provide diagnoses or health alerts for GPs, carers and insurers in future, with the user’s permission.

IBM aspires to offer greater individual insights into people’s health and to advance this strategy, has bought Explorys (which owns one of the largest healthcare databases in the world) and healthcare specialist Phytel (which works with digital medical record systems to reduce hospital readmissions and automate communications).  Added to this, Apple iPhones provide ResearchKit, free software for gathering health data, which Apple states has already been used to develop apps to study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.

US consumer technology and wearables supplier Jawbone is trying to engage businesses with its fitness trackers as a way to monitor the health of a company’s workforce.  How does this leave the end user/employee?  For a start, if a company sought to monitor the health of an employee, consent has to be given freely, with the ability to withdraw that consent at any time.

Insurers are also keen to get in on the act, with companies like UK’s Vitality offering rewards to policy holders for undergoing certain activities whilst wearing their devices.  Are we reaching the point though where data analytics lead ultimately to cover being withheld, other than premiums going up or down.

The latest UK Government stats show that 61.9% of adults and 28% of children aged between 2 and 15 are overweight with a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.  The cost of health problems associated with being overweight and obese is estimated to cost the NHS more than £5billion every year.

For GPs, gathering data which gives a broader and more accurate picture of exercise undertaken and calories consumed, could alter health directives on the amount of sleep we need, or which exercises are most effective.

Gazing into the NHS’ future, a carrot and stick approach accompanied by bold education messaging for health reform of UK citizens may be the tough approach needed by the next Government.  However, to succeed, with an NHS in crisis on funding and struggling to hold onto its GPs through which the future frontline is directed, many parts of its processes and systems will have to go digital. This comes back to having data shared securely with privacy maintained and strict governance on who it is share by – and that is a big promise to keep.

 

 

The Week’s Technology News – 28th March 2014

A little more seasoning with that sensor, Sir?
The first international factory for ingestible sensors, is to be built in the UK by US company, Proteus Digital Health.  The factory will have the NHS and the UK Government as partners.   Portable devices such as these are decentralising healthcare and will transform the way healthcare can be delivered in partnership with the patient. The technology is swallowed and the stomach fluids power the sensor by transporting it via stomach fluids.  A body worn patch sends information captured to a mobile device.  Such technologies have the potential to be transformative to healthcare, as the collection of data and mobile management tools enable diagnosis, faster assessment and more accurate treatment, linking the patient, their carer and clinician to help them stay well.  The technology will become more affordable and convenient as specialists in consumer technology are conjoining with medical technology and identifying commercial opportunity.  For an already overstretched NHS this sounds like a welcome IT technological advance.

Irritation with spammers creates collaboration amongst mobile giants and ICO
EE, O2, Three and Vodafone and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are working together to prevent nuisance text messages of spammers and fraudsters spreading across the UK’s four major mobile networks. This is being done by the mobile group signing up to the GSMA Spam Reporting Service. This will be coupled with mechanisms in real time to find the perpetrators. Those who have breached the Privacy of Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR), will have monetary penalties issued against them.  In 2012, the ICO issued a £440,000 fine to two men running a spam texting operation.  The GSMA platform will collate and analyse the details of users’ reported spam to id patterns and origins of attack. The collaborative aim of the group is to isolate and prevent spread to other networks.  The ICO is also looking to extend this into nuisance calls.  Vigilance against threats to mobile devices are an ongoing challenge for MSPs, as mobile workforces become ever more commonplace. Reducing fear and threat should certainly get the thumbs up from the marketplace.

Keep your MITs off our data
A group of MIT researchers have created a new platform for creating spy proof websites by building secure sites, services and applications, called Mylar.  This is in response to the high profile Snowden leaks of government agency incursions in the USA to capture people’s private data and to counter the increase in identify theft and hacking efforts internationally.  With Mylar, the data remains encrypted all the time in its servers and only decrypted when accessed from your computer, with correct password authentication.  The system is being tested by a group of patients in the US to share medical information with their doctors and the designers are exploring their own chat, photo sharing and calendar applications.   Whether this leads to a more commercial take up remains to be seen, as web providers may be reluctant to use a technology which restricts clients’ websites from accessing user data to serve targeted ads.

Gartner take time out to stare up at the clouds
One of Gartner’s leading Storage Technology and Strategist Directors, Valdis Fink, has been thinking afresh about how Cloud needs to develop, versus how it has been used.   For organisations, a primary benefit of Cloud has been to shift capital costs to operational costs.  SMEs who have had their own servers or back up options, are increasingly taking up the opportunity to outsource to secure data centres.  However, data centres have remained the same with centralised grid computing architecture which has got larger and the offerings cheaper, so data (and apps) has essentially just been re-centralised elsewhere. Fink maintains that real cloud computing should be location and device independent, safe and accessible from anywhere, within the internet, on peoples’ computers and devices, in data centres and in hyper-scale data centres, using information dispersal algorithms.  Such technologies are available today, which synch and secure. So the challenge for forward thinking MSPs is to drive the thinking, rather than follow major vendors to ensure your service is “leading edge” and right for your clients who have every right to expect the best.