Posts by: Sean Duffy

What’s Inside FutureMed’s Demo Room?

by Sean Duffy on Feb 9, 2012

Singularity University’s FutureMed program is running this week. We’ll soon be covering segments of the event in more depth, but yesterday we peeked into their demo room to see what sort of medical technology advances they are showcasing.  Here is a sampling of what we found:

EyeNETRA grew out of a research effort at MIT’s Media Lab. They’ve developed a hardware sleeve that sits on top of a mobile phone, which, when paired with its corresponding software, enables the accurate diagnosis of refractive errors. Or said more simply, their system can check your eyes to see what prescription glasses you need.

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FutureMed is Set to Blow Minds (Again) in February 2012

by Sean Duffy on Dec 5, 2011

Last year Daniel Kraft, the chair of Singularity University’s FutureMed, contacted Medgadget and asked if we’d provide on-site coverage of his new (at the time) five day executive education program. We met up in Palo Alto and Daniel shared his vision, showed us the speaker list and draft schedule, and we were immediately sold.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Singularity University (SU), you can think of it as a Silicon Valley institution rigged up to be an innovator honey pot of sorts – a place to pull together folks hammering at the edges of technology to explore how their work can better shape the future. FutureMed is SU’s medical executive education program and last year’s event was exceptional.

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TEDMED Day 4 – Nano Shapes and Confronting Death

by Sean Duffy on Oct 31, 2011

TEDMED 2011 finished up with a short morning session for attendees to learn just a little bit more before they checked out of the Del and headed out of San Diego. On the whole, the TEDMED crew once again pulled off a spectacular conference. The quality of the talks (especially Day 3) and social events was exceptional and we’d like to give a big thanks to the TEDMED team for working so hard to put on such a meaningful event.

Jay Walker himself started off the morning by showing us some rare artifacts from his amazing library of human imagination. Most interesting was a punch card from the Jacquard loom, the first machine to use an automated and replicable input of instructions to reliably repeat an action. This innovation from the early 1800s inspired Charles Babbage years later as he built his difference engine, largely considered to be the foundation of modern computing technology. Along with the punch card from the loom itself, Jay had a small book of prayers where each page was woven out of silk using the Jacquard loom itself. This served as an incredible marketing piece for the loom and instantly changed people’s notions at the time of what a loom could do.

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TEDMED Day 3 – Mushroom Loving Insects and FDA Blues

by Sean Duffy on Oct 28, 2011

We’re here at TEDMED 2011 and have just finished up day three of the conference. It was a spectacular. Yesterday (day 2) was solid and today (day 3) was stellar. The talks, ranging from mushrooms to the FDA, allowed TEDMED to really flex its muscles as a world class affair.

Today’s proceedings started with another song-based wrap-up (of yesterday’s talks) by Jonathan Mann and led into a talk by renowned photographer Rick Smolan. His photography book The Power to Heal was given as a part of the TEDMED schwag bag and his talk told the story of his career including the conception of the day in the life series which grew to be one of the most popular photography projects in history. His next goal is to produce a work that takes the digital pulse of the nation through “Big Data.” He’s on the hunt for collaborators so if you’re interested in how data reflects the state of human beings, email us and we can pass your thoughts his way.

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TEDMED Day 2 – Glow in the Dark Tumors that Blind Rats Can Now See

by Sean Duffy on Oct 27, 2011

We’ve just wrapped up day two at TEDMED, retiring to our rooms after a beach clambake at the beautiful Hotel Del Coronado. After a bit of a slow start in the morning sessions, things picked up to make a great day of talks, filled with medical innovation, performances, and more. In addition to this summary of the day’s events, stay tuned for a set of interviews with companies from the TEDMED innovation showcase, among others.

Song-a-day writer Jonathan Mann (of iPhone Antenna Song notoriety) kicked-off today with a song introducing TEDMED and getting the audience ready for a rapid fire talk by Daniel Kraft, chair of Singularity University’s FutureMed (a spectacular program that we’ve also covered). For those of you who don’t know Daniel, you can think of him as medical trendspotter extraordinaire, and he took us on a tour of the advances in technology and health as he sees them from his purview at Singularity University. Most of the innovations he discussed we’ve covered on Medgadget, so we’ll hold off from going into too much detail (or check out his TED talk here), but notably Daniel spoke about how when he finished his training at Massachusetts General Hospital 15 years ago the hospital still functioned, from an delivery standpoint, in about the same way as it does today, with speciality silos, defined training hierarchy, etc.

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TEDMED Day 1 – Pop It, Lock It, and Take a Statin

by Sean Duffy on Oct 26, 2011

Medgadget’s coverage of TEDMED has one simple goal: to give you a synopsis of each day so that you can get the TEDMED highlights from afar. The full speaker list is here. If there’s anything in particular you’d like us to cover in more depth, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below. 

It’s that time of the year again and we’re thrilled to be here at TEDMED 2011 at the beautiful Hotel Del in San Diego. This is the third time we’ve covered this conference in depth and for those of you who were not with us the last two years, we tend to take a different approach to this event than others. Instead of cherry-picking one or two things we like, we prefer to give a recap of each day, briefly covering what we feel are the most relevant talks to our audience. TEDMED is a fast four days filled with sixty speakers and if we’ve done our job properly, you’ll leave our coverage having gotten the highlights of the conference.

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Zeo Brings Sleep Tracking to Your Phone

by Sean Duffy on Sep 27, 2011

Sleep tracking company Zeo has announced today that they’ll soon be selling a mobile version of their product, compatible with both iOS and Android.  The company previously only offered what amounted to a base-station clock with a sleep monitoring  headband. Together they tracked your sleep patterns, including Light, Deep, and REM, but in the process the data got a bit trapped in their clock. To upload sleep data to the web for easier analysis, users had to pull an SD card out of the clock, plug it to a computer, and complete the upload. This step presented a pretty high barrier to learning about your personal sleep.

The mobile version solves this by eliminating the intermediary to your sleep metrics. By porting the data directly to your phone, users will be able to see richer charts and easier to understand summary metrics on how well they are sleeping, as well as have access to the full suite of Zeo’s “Sleep Management” tools.

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NanoLogix Makes Live-Cell Petri Cultures 4x-12x Faster

by Sean Duffy on Aug 22, 2011

Microorganism diagnostics are difficult to speed up even though fast results can be tremendously useful for clinical decision making. If you’re testing a patient for say, MRSA colonization, traditionally you’d either have to smear a sample on a Petri dish (or equivalent) and wait for it to grow to detectible levels, or grind the sample up and run a PCR on the extracted DNA. Both of these can be slow processes. Innovation in rapid PCR has sped things up considerably but still leaves two problems: the first is that unless you use special work-arounds, you’re not able to distinguish between living and dead microorganisms, and the second is that it’s expensive.

NanoLogix, a company out of Ohio, is trying to solve both of these by commercializing their cost-effective Petri dish membrane that supercharges a traditional culture to allow earlier detection of viable microorganisms. In summary, they’ve got a thin film that traps the microorganisms but doesn’t hinder their growth. By helping them grow in a thin plane, and by helping staining agents propagate through the sample more efficiently, the company enables pathologists and clinicians to see growth faster. They claim 6 hour MRSA detection, 6 hour Group B Strep, 4 hour E. Coli, and 6 hour Anthrax.

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Inside the Magic Watch: Interview with Basis CEO Jef Holove

by Sean Duffy on Aug 2, 2011

Medgadget: You’re new to Basis, Jeff, right? It’s been what, a few months?

Jef Holove: I’ve been here since April, officially. And I’ve been involved with the organization on a progressive basis since last September of last year. I first met Nadeem, the founder and Bharat, our Chief Operating Officer who came from EA. And then I just started meeting more and more of the team as I started to get closer. I first met them as an introduction from our Venture Capitalist because I was running a company that was a device connected to a web service and so there was some feeling like, “Well, maybe I’ve learned a thing or two about that that might be useful to the Basis guys,” and then I just fell in love with what they were doing. It’s a very different thing to get up every day and go into the office, loving the team and the product, but also feeling like what you’re doing is much more important than just the individual business and the individual product.

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