health technology

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November 26, 2012 | 12:38 PM |

Esther Dyson: Don’t Blame Fat People

Esther Dyson in a 2011 photo by Frank-Jurgen Richter (via Wikimedia Commons)


I think of Esther Dyson as a Geek Queen. She’s a longtime angel investor and prominent public voice on matters technological. (She’s also a former journalist whose description of our current institutional health system as a “calcified hairball” made me laugh out loud.)

In recent years, she’s added the topic of health care and how technology can help us be healthier to her portfolio, and Slate has just posted a provocative piece she wrote after a Medicine X conference at Stanford. Clearly she touched a nerve, with her “Hate the sin, not the sinner” approach to obesity: The post has already prompted more than 700 comments. She writes in part:

To be sure, it is worthwhile to foster healthy behavior, which will lower costs and improve many people’s lives. But how far do we want to go? Where are the appropriate limits when it comes to encouraging good behavior? Can good behavior be encouraged without ever punishing bad behavior?

I suspect that different societies, cultures, employers, and governments will come up with different answers. In part, we need to feel comfortable with the reality that there is no environment perfect for everyone, and there are no perfect people. In a world of statistics, it is 100 percent likely that fewer than 100 percent of people will be happy. We try to mitigate bad luck, but we cannot eliminate it.

In practical terms, though, we would be wise to listen to Collazo’s plea: “I am not a fat blob, having [unhealthy] English breakfasts, who gave herself diabetes. I AM A HUMAN, AND I HAVE DIGNITY.” Collazo identifies the problem for her—and for all of us: “Is there some diabetes that is preventable? I don’t think anyone FULLY knows the answer to that. BUT SO WHAT? Does it mean I no longer deserve dignity if I do get it? If I ‘fail’ to ‘prevent’ it? Should I now be excommunicated from the population at large? Should I be made an ‘example’ to others? Should I be spoken of as a plague? As an unwanted thing in the world?” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, health technology, obesity
July 3, 2012 | 11:23 AM |

If Your Phone Could Warn You When You’re About To Overeat

 

(paulymer/Flickr Creative Commons)

Here’s my dream of a dieting app: It picks up your brain waves, and when you start to crave chocolate or chips, it instantly hyper-activates your neural receptors for feelings of fullness, so you have that “couldn’t eat another bite” feeling until the cravings pass.

Sigh. Someday. Right now, what we mainly have is app upon app that lets you record what you eat and add up those calories, then record your exercise and subtract those calories. This is not a bad thing. Keeping a food diary is a proven tool for successful dieting. But, as obesity researcher Sherry Pagoto writes on Psychology Today, these apps are somewhat underwhelming, not the game-changers that mobile tech seems to have the promise to deliver.

So Pagoto, a clinical psychologist and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is aiming to develop a more sophisticated app, one that incorporates “sensing” technology — from GPS for location to heart rate for possible stress. She and University of Massachusetts colleague Deepak Ganesan have just won a $185,000 grant from the university President’s Science & Technology Initiatives Fund to launch that effort.

You drive in to McDonald’s and your phone pings you: ‘Are you sure you want to go in? Last week you ate a 1,200-calorie meal here.’

Imagine: You drive into McDonald’s and your smartphone, picking up your location via GPS, pings you: “Are you sure you want to go in? Last week you ate a 1,200-calorie meal here.” Or it’s 3 p.m., just an hour away from your usual mid-afternoon junk-food foray, and the app suggests: “You often grab candy at 4 p.m. Perhaps you’d like a snack of protein and whole grains now to head that off?” Or it’s a brutal workday, and the app says, “Your body is showing signs of stress. Perhaps you’d like to do some deep breathing rather than self-soothing with food?”

When Pagoto works with weight management clients, she tends to see them weekly, which means they come in and describe the moments when they fell down on their weight-loss efforts only after the fact. “I’m not there; I can’t help them,” she said. “I’d love a mobile phone to be me, but me with you all the time” — even if “I’m putting myself out of business by doing this.”

Similar work is under way on apps for drug and smoking addicts, aiming to detect when a relapse is especially likely based on place or stress levels or other cues. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Personal Health, diet, health technology, obesity