ISB News

SXSW Healthcare Track Raises Question About Tech Tipping Point

This morning, one of our researchers who's working parttime to develop pilot projects related to personalized medicine for the P4 Medicine Institute (P4MI) shared an update. Among the challenges of launching a pilot project is getting individuals and, especially, families to collect biometric data over time. This involves a willingness from participants not only to record all this data but share it in the cloud, which raises questions about security as well as access to the necessary digital tools. As the data is being collected, there also needs to be the ability to process and analyze the information. It's a lot to think about, but ISB is committed to research that will lead to P4 medicine (predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory) and it will take a combined effort to achieve it.

This article, posted on Health Leaders Media, offers some insight, or at least hope, that a broader consumer movement toward adopting health 2.0 technologies – which eventually will lead to personalized medicine – may be afoot. And that movement may get some help by the so-called hipsters, who are either digtial natives or technology early adopters, who flock to Austin, Texas, every year for South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, which is taking place now.

The Basis watch (shown above) is a highly anticipated device that will record its wearer's heart rate, number of calories burned, sleep and other biometric information.

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