Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

links for 2009-08-28

• Towards healthiier communication
  Computer scientists at the University of Southampton are using social networking tools to explore if individuals can enhance their personal and social wellbeing over time if they quickly share how they feel about issues such as their busyness, enjoyment, health and stress via these networks.
  (tags: consumer+health+search web2.0)
• SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer
  SKOS—Simple Knowledge Organization System—provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other similar types of controlled vocabulary. As an application of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), SKOS allows concepts to be composed and published on the World Wide Web, linked with data on the Web and integrated into other concept schemes.
  (tags: ontology w3c semantic+web rdf metadata OWL)

links for 2009-08-10

• Motorola celebrates 25 years of mobile phones with 12 concepts that look nothing like mobile phones - Core77
  'In conversation last week with Dickon Isaac, Motorola's North American design manager, the possible explanation of a "design mythology" came up: the idea that a set of universal aspirations are crucial for an organization to develop the drive and coherence necessary for real innovation and a unified identity, much as engineers in the 50s and 60s looked to the gee-whiz sci-fi of their youth for inspiration in developing the space program.'
  (tags: hci scenario+planning user+experience)
• What will communication devices look like in 2033?
  'Twenty-five years after the creation of the cell phone, designers at Motorola imagined what cell phones might look like in another twenty five years. The Consumer Xperience Design (CXD) team created a portfolio of sketches that look beyond what is possible today and imagine the possibilities of the future.'
  (tags: scenario+planning technology+and+society hci user+experience)
• Neil Postman - Science and the Story that We Need
  'Those who are skeptical about the language and presuppositions of the great god of technology, those who are inclined to take the name of the technology-god in vain, have been condemned as reactionary renegades, especially when they speak of gods of a different kind. Among those who have risked heresy was Max Frisch, who remarked that “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.” But he along with other heretics were cast aside and made to bear the damning mark of “Luddite” all of their days.'
  (tags: society+and+culture technology+and+society information+technology)
• ICT Results - SPECIAL FEATURE: Healthcare, the road to robotic helpers
  Robots are whirring away in factories all over the world, building cars, phones and cookers. Yet they can do so much more. Robotics for healthcare has been tipped as the next big wave, and Europe should be poised to ride it, according to a European road-mapping study. '
  (tags: health+informatics robotics technology+and+society)

links for 2009-08-06

• Brain-Computer Interfaces, Virtual Reality, and Videogames
  'Far beyond science-fiction clichés and the image of a person connected to cyberspace via direct cerebral implants as in The Matrix, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can offer a new means of playing videogames or interacting with 3D virtual environments (VEs).'
  (tags: hci brain-computer+interface virtual+reality serious+games virtual+worlds)
• 3D Social Virtual Worlds: Research Issues and Challenges
  'The advent and success of 3D social virtual worlds (SVWs) reveal challenges worth exploring for both researchers and managers. In his famous science-fiction novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson envisioned the Internet evolving into what he called a "metaverse," a 3D virtual reality (VR)-based space in which people interacted and communicated with each other through their avatars (graphical representations of themselves).'
  (tags: virtual+worlds virtual+reality technology+and+society)

links for 2009-08-04

• Corey Goldberg: Pylot - Web Load Testing from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  I have been playing around with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It allows you to provision virtual machines on-demand and configure and control your own compute clusters. To do external (over a WAN) performance\load testing against your web application or services, you can put together a cloud based test harnesses using some simple tools. My open source tool Pylot does the job well for simple web performance and load tests. Pylot generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests), verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI or shell/console. You define your test cases in an XML file. This is where you specify the requests (url, method, body/payload, etc) and verifications.
  (tags: programming python ec2 scalability amazon load-testing cloud+computing)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
  'Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.'
  (tags: ec2 s3 amazon cloud+computing architecture)
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
  'Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.'
  (tags: web2.0 programming cloud+computing scalability virtualization architecture amazon ec2)
• Corey Goldberg: Python - Zip Directories Recursively
  Code for zipping up files in a directory structure.
  (tags: python programming how-to)

links for 2009-08-03

• Health Informatics Issues and Views
  Hemant Shah's blog.
  (tags: biomedical+informatics biomedical+research)
• Speech act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  'According to Austin's preliminary informal description, the idea of an "illocutionary act" can be captured by emphasising that "by saying something, we do something", as when someone orders someone else to go by saying "Go!", or when a minister joins two people in marriage saying, "I now pronounce you husband and wife." (Austin would eventually define the "illocutionary act" in a more exact manner.)'
  (tags: design conversational+media)