Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

links for 2008-10-30

• Brain Stimulant: Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap
  'The Future of Humanity Institute has just recently published a roadmap that describes what scientific research is required to do whole brain simulation on a computer. Here's a small quote from that paper...'
  (tags: scenario+planning society+and+culture)

links for 2008-10-28

• Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics?: Scientific American
  'Waste is unavoidable—a sad fact of life quantified by the famous second law of thermodynamics. But if the world is steadily becoming more disordered, how do you explain the self-organization that often occurs in nature? At root, the trouble is that classical thermodynamics assumes systems are in equilibrium, a placid condition seldom truly achieved in the real world. '
  (tags: Complex+adaptive+systems chaos)
• Augmented Reality Makes Commercial Headway: Scientific American
  'Although AR has mostly lived in the lab (except, notably, in the form of head-up displays for fighter jets), the recent emergence of highly capable mobile devices is fueling a surge in interest. (Much of the AR technology on cell phones is based on work done at Graz University of Technology in Austria.) “I think that we’re on the cusp of widespread application of AR technology, perhaps in a year or two,” Billinghurst says, pointing to the Eye of Judgment, a video game for Sony’s PlayStation 3, as the most prominent example of the trend. Players look at cards through a camera and watch animated versions of the game characters on the cards fight one another. The ability is based on identifying real-world objects and estimating their locations in space.'
  (tags: scenario+planning virtual+reality augmented-reality interaction+design)

links for 2008-10-27

• U Rank - Home
  'U Rank is a search engine that allows people to organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others. We believe that finding something on the web is only the first step for many tasks. To better support people as they are exploring a topic, comparing information, keeping track of what they're learning, and collaborating with others, U Rank has general support for organizing, annotating, remembering, and sharing search results. U Rank is a research prototype, to help us learn more about how people use such technologies so we can continue to innovate. '
  (tags: scenario+planning cscw consumer+health+search)
• Gartner: Top 10 technologies to watch over the next three years | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
  'On Tuesday, Gartner analysts Carl Claunch and Dave Cearley gave a crowd of IT leaders at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 a list of the top 10 technologies that will provide important strategic advantages to IT over the next three years. They encouraged the leaders to keep these technologies in mind as they formulate budgets and long-term plans.'
  (tags: scenario+planning information+technology)
• UNC paper: Analyzing Environments and Developing Scenarios
  'College and university leaders are being bombarded by tumultuous forces for change as we go into the twenty-first century: virtual classrooms, global communications, global economies, telecourses, distance learning, corporate classrooms, increased competition among social agencies for scarce resources, pressure for institutional mergers, statewide program review and so on. It is no exaggeration to say that, in total, these forces hold the potential for a radical rethinking of the mission, structure, curriculum, student body, and stakeholder relations of virtually every college and university.'
  (tags: scenario+planning methodology)
• Remote Monitoring Technologies Could Shave Health Care Costs by $197 Billion
  'The United States could cut $197 billion from its health care bill over the next 25 years by widespread use of remote monitoring to track the vital signs of patients with chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure and diabetes, according to a new study released today by economist Robert Litan. Litan said that savings would be maximized by public policy adjustments that encourage health care institutions and individual caregivers to accelerate the use of remote monitoring.'
  (tags: health+informatics telemedicine)

links for 2008-10-24

• Edge: Daniel Kahnemann on innovative work in behavioral economics
  Transcript of a lecture by Kahnemann and discussion with Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, and Danny Hillis. Video of part of lecture. Major implications for online search.
  (tags: economics cognition information+retrieval)

IEEE Spectrum: New Brain-Machine Interface Reactivates Monkey's Paralyzed Muscles

I just noticed this in the October issue of the IEEE Spectrum: New Brain-Machine Interface Reactivates Monkey's Paralyzed Muscles.

Though it will be years before spinal bypass surgery reaches even the clinical-experiment stage, researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and the Washington National Primate Research Center, both in Seattle, have figured out a way to get macaque monkeys in their lab to manipulate temporarily paralyzed muscles in their arms using brain-controlled electrical stimulation. In research reported last week in Nature, they describe what happened when they attached electrodes to neurons in a monkey’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement—and used fairly simple algorithms to translate activity in these cortical cells into electrical signals that tell muscles when, how much, and how forcefully to contract.

This is very encouraging news on a number of fronts. Of course it is good news for spinal trauma patients and patients suffering from degenerative structural nervous system disorders. But it also potentially bodes well for some unusual types human-computer interfaces.

Picture the scenario described above, but with the downstream actuator side of the circuit embedded in the body of someone other than the person whose brain is generating the signal. Imagine a surgeon teaching a surgical resident a very tricky procedure, and able to guide the resident's hand just as she would her own. Although the stimuli are coming from the outside, I'd bet that the resident's nervous system would retain the "muscle memory" of the surgeon-guided actions, aiding the buildup of tacit knowledge that characterizes expertise.

That's the first outside-the-box use that's occurred to me in a few minutes of reading and thought, but this is outside my current scope of activity (darn it!). I'll bet many other and better ideas will arise in the fertile minds of the biomedical engineering community as this unfolds.

links for 2008-10-23

• RGE - Current Market Turmoil: Non-Priceable Uncertainty Versus Priceable Risk
  Prescient August 2007 analysis of how the US financial markets are melting down 14 months later.
  (tags: financial+meltdown)

links for 2008-10-22

• Technology Review: Untangling Web Information
  'The next big stage in the evolution of the Internet, according to many experts and luminaries, will be the advent of the Semantic Web--that is, technologies that let computers process the meaning of Web pages instead of simply downloading or serving them up blindly. Microsoft's acquisition of the semantic search engine Powerset earlier this year shows faith in this vision. But thus far, little Semantic Web technology has been available to the general public. That's why many eyes will be on Twine, a Web organizer based on semantic technology that launches publicly today.'
  (tags: twine semantic+web)

links for 2008-10-21

• GBN: Small Businesses and the Future of U.S. Healthcare in 2015
  'What might the future of U.S. healthcare look like from the perspective of small businesses five or 10 years from now? That was the guiding question of a GBN project with the Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE), an organization with 17,000 members in Northeast Ohio. The goal of the project was to envision potential paths for the U.S. healthcare system in order to encourage and inspire new thinking, better strategies, and more effective advocacy.'
  (tags: scenario+planning)

links for 2008-10-20

• simile-widgets - Google Code
  New home for the MIT Simile project, including the timeline widget.
  (tags: Web2.0 Ajax api visualization)
• SIMILE | Timeline
  A mashup tool from MIT for creating timelines based on data you supply.
  (tags: Web2.0 Ajax api visualization)
• Desktop 3D Printer – Alaris30
  3D or "thing" printing is becoming a commercial reality.
  (tags: scenario+planning)
• Service Design Research
  Compilation of 30 years' worth of research papers on the design of services. Given our transition to a service-based economy, this seems like an important subject for 21st Century USA.
  (tags: scenario+planning)

The unexpected convergence of gaming and enterprise IT

I have been reading articles on the state of the art in computer gaming technologies from the August issue of the Communications of the ACM. One in particular, Scaling in Games and Virtual Worlds by Jim Waldo, describes the (up to now) unique characteristics of computer gaming from a scalability perspective, which to my surprise began to resonate with my vision of the future of enterprise IT, particularly healthcare enterprise IT and health informatics.

At the risk of plagiarizing, I'm going to reproduce the entire introduction, which is a very small part of the whole article, and is aimed at enticing you to subscribe to the magazine (by joining ACM) or pay for the article. Here goes:

I used to be like you.

I used to be a systems programmer, working on infrastructure used by banks, telecom companies, and other engineers. I worked on operating systems. I worked on distributed middleware. I worked on programming languages. I wrote tools. I did all of the things that hardcore systems programmers do.

And I knew the rules. I knew that throughput was the real test of scaling. I knew that data had to be kept consistent and durable, and that relational databases are the way to ensure atomicity, and that loss of information is never an option. I knew that clients were getting thinner as the layers of servers increased, and that the best client would be one that contained the least amount of state and allowed the important computations to go on inside the computing cloud. I knew that support for legacy code is vital to the adoption of any new technology, and that most legacy code has yet to be written.

But two years ago my world changed. I was asked to take on the technical architect position on Project Darkstar, a distributed infrastructure targeted to the massive-multiplayer online game and virtual-world market. At first, it seemed like a familiar system. The goal was to scale flexibly by enabling the dynamic addition (or subtraction) of machines to match load. There was a persistence layer and a communication layer. We also wanted to make the programming model as simple as possible, while enabling the system to use all the power of the new generations of multicore chips that Sun (and others) were producing. These were all problems that I had encountered before, so how hard could these particular versions of the problems for this particular market be? I agreed to spend a couple of months on the project, cleaning up the architecture and making sure it was on the right track while I thought about new research topics that I might want to tackle.

The three months have turned into two years (and counting). I've found lots of new research challenges, but they all have to do with finding ways to make the environment for online games and virtual worlds scale. In the process, I have been introduced to a different world of computing, with different problems, different assumptions, and a different environment. At times I feel like an anthropologist who has discovered a new civilization. I'm still learning about the culture and practice of games, and it is a different world.

The next section is entitled "Everything You Know Is Wrong" - and from a computer science perspective it is true, with respect to gaming now and healthcare enterprise IT as it will soon be. Let's explore why.