Wellness FX

I like information.  I remember arguing with an internal medicine collegue during my residency, telling them I didn't want to do an Arterial Blood Gas (ABG) on a patient.  First off, ABGs are extremely painful as the blood is drawn from the radial artery and because arteries are thicker and muscular there is more pain involved.  Secondly I felt I knew what the patient needed without the ABG.  My colleague finally said to me "Listen Jared, I like information, the more the better and by having more of it I can make better decisions."  I still don't think I needed an ABG on that patient, but I like information as well.

Wellness FX is a service which gives you more information, in fact it can give you about as much information from your blood as is available with lab tests.  Wellness FX is a lab analysis program where you can purchase lab draws from their site and go to a local lab and get the blood drawn, and then speak to a health professional about the results.  All you have to do is sign up, pay $29 for the most basic blood draw and in two days you can have your cholesterol results, blood count results, thyroid stimulating hormone results and blood glucose results.  They offer way more tests than that, here is a list.  I went with the cheap tests and this is how easy it was.

1. I signed up and entered in some general account and health information, this took about 20 minutes.
2. I printed the order form with a list of the tests to be done with an ordering doctors name who I never met or spoke with.
3. I fasted and drove to the lab, the draw took 10 minutes and I was done.  
4. The next day I recieved an email telling me to log in and look at my results.
5. The results were laid out in a very simple format

All in all the process was super simple and for $29 dollars you get most of the information that a young healthy person needs to know if they need to talk to their doctor.  I wish they included a kidney function as well as liver enzyme test but for $29 the amount of tests done is pretty phenomenal   Personally if I am checking these markers on a yearly basis, sitting down in a drug store and checking my blood pressure a few times a year and I don't have any acute illnesses, I am not going to see my doctor until something is flagged.  Don't let my PCP know I said that.  

Another service provided is the opportunity to talk to a health care professional.  That may be a dietician, trainer, physician, etc.  When I looked into this all of the options given to me were dietitians  and no offense to dietitians  I have worked with many amazing ones.  If I am going to talk to a professional about lab tests I want to talk to an MD,NP or PA.

I like being in charge of my health information and I will likely use Wellness FX in a year for another check on my blood work.  Now I just need to find a service which will do the same thing for my colonoscopy.

The Basis Band and Amiigo Fitness Trackers.....The Anticipation is killing me.

Anticipation killed the cat, or something like that.  Well, after have the Fitbit One for about 3 weeks I am ready to test another type of fitness tracker.  The two I am dying to test are the Basis B1 and the Amiigo Fitness Tracker.  The Fitbit One is great, and I am getting ready to do a full review of it as a Fitness monitor, but I have to be honest, having a pedometer, altimeter and sleep tracker is not what I think will revolutionize healthcare.

The Basis B1 is cool because it actually tracks a couple vital signs; heart rate and skin temperature.  Now the temperature is not a core temperature but at least it is a start.  I am really excited by the constant heart rate monitoring without a chest strap.  Unfortunately, when I click on the Buy it now link I am redirected to a blank field to put in my email and wait for an invitation to buy.

The Amiigo Tracker is cool because it tracks other movements other than walking, biking etc.  The Amiigo tracks heart rate but also can tell if you are lifting weights, what lift you are doing and how many reps you are doing.  If you are playing tennis or golf and how many swings you are attempting.

For now I will have to content myself to the simple trackers but, I look forward to the opportunity to test something that I see as being much more transformative.

The Innovators

I recently listened to the book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, written by Steven Levy.  I also recently started listening to the biography of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson.  When I think about the most innovative companies of the last twenty years I definitely think of Apple and Google and the innovators, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.   The other day I was looking at the TEDMED website and on that site they have a section called The Hive.  The Hive has a list of 50 companies who are trying to advance health care through technology.  These are start up companies with big new ideas and the desire to make changes.

I was looking through The Hive website and wondering who would be the big innovators in healthcare.  I really do believe I am part of the last generation of mass trained physicians as we know them today.  50 years from now, computers and sensors, testing devices not yet invented will take my place.  We will need technicians, computer scientists, and engineers to continue to push the work forward, but the stethoscope wielding physician will be a thing of the past.  The process is already started.  Here is an article from The Atlantic, talking about how, Watson the super computer that won at Jeopardy, is being trained at Sloan Kettering to better treat lung and breast cancer.  Imagine an army of super computers all trained by the best specialists in the world.  Now imagine them being used after they are trained to treat patients on their own, instantly incorporating new data and always being up to date on the most proven treatments.  I don't think it will take too many studies after these computers are trained and their algorithms well tuned to show they make less mistakes than a human doctor.  We are decades away from the computes running the health care show, but it will likely be in our lifetimes.

That being said, who will be the Steve Jobs, Larry Page of Sergey Brin of the future?  Will it be one of the entrepreneurs listed on the TedMed Hive, or will it be someone from the USC Center for Body Computing?  Will it be a kid at Harvard, MIT, Stanford or UVA (my alma-mater)?  Or one of the million of computer engineers around the world, in China, India, Israel  Sweden or one of the other computer powerhouse countries?  Who will be the Innovator who changes our world?   Give me your ideas in the comments below of who you think might be the innovator of our future.

The Perfect Tracker.

I know that so far I haven't done any reviews of health trackers, but I have a good reason.  I just started using one and I am not ready to do a review yet. I purchased a Fitbit One about a week ago I am not going to do my review of the Fitbit One right now but, since wearing it I have been thinking about the perfect tracker and what it would do.

The perfect tracker would be forgettable, but not be forgotten.  Compliance in medicine is one of the plagues of being a doctor.  It doesn't matter if we prescribe the right medicine, give patients the right diet to follow or exercises to do, if the patient does not comply none of our effort will be fruitful.  A forgettable tracker would be so much part of someone that they wouldn't even have to think about putting it on because it would be part of something they use every day.

Now this might freak some people out, but I think the best way would be to actually have the tracker built into the body somehow.  Even now, I don't understand why pacemakers don't tell patients more and why they don't transmit information to doctors more easily.  However, since most of us won't want something built into the body, I think a watch is most likely to win as the mode of choice.

The perfect tracker would give you blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature, as well as sleep patterns and activity.  Vital signs are vital, and knowing your own vital signs could be life saving as well as inspiring for better health.

The perfect tracker would be part of a huge network of data that is constantly increasing and getting smarter.  Just like Google Search gets smarter the more data Google's servers hold.  Health analytics and community health can make leaps and bounds with innumerable points of data and algorithms that become smarter over time, signaling to doctors and consumers who is just about to get sick and what might be causing it.

I have only tested one tracker for a week but I basically know the specs and technology behind every tracker I have heard of and I have not heard of a tracker that can do these things.  When that tracker comes around I think we are in for some exciting times in health.  I also believe we will see a new specialty for physicians.  It will be mobile health.  Doctors will be making house calls again, driving around town checking on the those whose trackers are signaling upcoming danger.

Tricorder X-Prize

I love the X-prize.  Moon shots that often seem nearly impossible to do and then somehow someone ends up winning the prize and we see that commercial space flight is possible or that a car can go 100 miles on a gallon of gas.  The last x-prize was announced at CES in January of this year.

Now some might think that a machine that supplants doctors would make me nervous.  Not at all.  I look forward to the day when people are healthier because of technology and I feel that the Tricorder X-prize is a step in that direction.  It is a moon shot.  The device that is built will need to diagnose 13 core diseases.  Here is a a list of the diseases.

Anemia

UTI

Diabetes type-II

Atrial Fibrillation

Stroke

Sleep apnea

Tuberculosis

COPD

Pneumonia

Otitis

Leukocytosis

Hep A

Absence of condition

The machine must also track 5 vital signs constantly.

EKG

Blood Pressure

Respiratory Rate

Temperature

Oxygen Saturation

Lastly the machine will also diagnose at least 3 elective diseases from the following list.

Pertussis

Hypertension

Mono

Allergen (air)

hypo/hyper thyroid

Food-borne ill.

Shingles

Melenoma

Strep

Cholestrol screen

HIV screen

Osteoporosis

The tricorder is meant to be developed as a straight to consumer device so people will be able to diagnose themselves and only go to the doctor if something is off.

For a day or two I dreamed of entering the contest and with my limited technology connections tried to put a team together.  I was unsuccessful, but look forward to the leaps forward we are able to make in the next two years during the competition.

List of Trackers

I have been collecting a list of trackers and would love to find more.  Below is the list I have found on my own.  I did omit some if the same company had several trackers.  Please comment and tell me about any others you may know of not on the list.  I know this list is incomplete so please pitch in to help me find more.  My goal is to test all of these as well as other health tracking services such as 23andme and WellnessFX so also let me know if you know of other online services you think would be worth my testing.

Thanks--


Stand Alone wearable Units
Fitbit
Jawbone
Nike Fuel
Sensoria
Basis B1
Striiv Play
Withings Smart Activity Tracker
BodyMedia
Larklife
Fitbug
Coche
Misfit Shine
Breathwear


Watch Based Units
Motorola MotoACTV
Garmin Forerunner
Pebble
Basis Band
Mio Alpha
Leikr
Runner and Multisport by TomTom
Bandu

The Beginning

Every movement forward, every action that makes a difference, there is a begining.  This is my beginnning of blogging, and hopefully helping people be a little healthier and more aware of the devices and services used to track our bodies.  I named the blog Body Tracker as this blog will be focused on the fitness and health trackers that are currently flooding the market and have the potential to flood the world with better health if only we will use them.  For years now the experts have been talking about a future when our doctor can know our every heartbeat, our every breath and our every exercise.  Well... that future is closer than many think.

I personally think it is exciting, not so doctors can know more about you, but so they can see you less.  In a time when health care costs continue to rise, I see this emerging technology as one of the keys to empower patients to take control of and understand their own health.  I also see this as a way that through the right algorithms and software doctors and patients can detect problems before they become emergencies and the patient ends up seeing me at work.

I hope you will join me frequently as I discuss different tracking technology, how it can be used, how it can be applied and how to be healthier.  I will test many of these devices myself.  I don't want to just give you a list of devices and their technical specifications, but try and give you a real feel for how they work and which one may help you do your own Body Tracking.