danielhooker.com 

Nike+, 23 and Me and OpenNotes: Current directions and controversy in personalized medicine

Self-Tracking for Behavior Change

I just invested in a Nike+ Sport kit, which, though they have been around for a while, just peaked my curiousity thanks to my reading of The Decision Tree. The author of that book, Thomas Goetz, points out that one of the most effective ways of motivating people to change their behaviour is to get them tracking their habits. For Weight Watchers, it’s points. For Nike+, it’s the distance and pace of your running.

All the Nike+ system is is a little doo-hickey that plugs into your iPod nano, and another little one that you stick in your shoe. I wasn’t too excited about switching shoe brands, so I hacked my Mizuno shoes that I know and love. But you can read about that elsewhere.

Once calibrated, the system is pretty slick. You can select a workout based on time (eg. 30 minutes), distance (5k, 3 miles), calories or free form. Then you pick some tunage to listen to while you run, and off you go. I have mine tracking in kilometers, and a kind voice pops up every once in a while to say “.5 k completed” or “300 meters left.”

When you’re done, you go home and sync your iPod and it zaps you out to nikeplus.com where your data is waiting for you to review. You can log a couple things yourself like how you felt, what the weather was like and the surface on which you were running. A graph of your pace shows how inconsistently fast or slow you were gadding about.

Other cool features:

• Goals: Set personal goals for distance, pace, etc.
• Nike+ Coach: training programs for you to follow to prepare for a race distance. This is hands-down my favorite feature of Nike+ so far. I have wanted to train for a half-marathon and went looking for a program but came back disappointed in the price and questionable quality of the programs online.
• Challenges: Other users of Nike+ create public goals and challenges for you to join and run along with them. Probably not for me, but a nice way to “socialize” the system.

I hope that Goetz is right and Nike+ gets me out a little more often. He argues that systems like these are often effective for getting people to change to healthy behaviors (link [1] to the AJPM study mentioned in that post) because they serve as personal motivators. Being able to systematically record your runs and easily watch your progress over the lifespan of your exercise program is certainly motivating for me.

23 and Me, Navigenics and personal genomics: Empowering or Frightening?

Read more »

MedlinePlus hits the town

So I know I’m a little late talking about MedlinePlus’s new design but I had just one or two things to say that I hadn’t read yet.

Michelle Kraft pointed out that the link to the mobile version of the page is at the bottom, so you have to scroll down to a) find it, and b) mash your screen to make it go. Agreed: annoying. But to me, the solution is not moving the link from the bottom to the top of the screen, the solution is adding some code and making the website detect mobile browsers automatically.

This technology is not new; in fact, many sites do it to say “Hey, you can’t use Firefox to login to this government page, use IE.” (ed. note: this can go awry: I recently tried to log in to an account at Government Canada and, because they require old versions of browsers, I literally did not have an approved version installed on my computer.) But anyway. Even my blog detects mobile browsers and redirects my viewers to the mobile theme.

There is a Google index literally full of solutions to this problem. Feeling lucky? Here’s one: http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/

Mobile issues aside, I am happy to see these changes. The huge buttons for the three major categories are great and the new look compartmentalizes the would-be overwhelming amount of content and makes it a little easier to parse.

Related to the “compartmentalization” of content, I am glad to see the links between sections (the information architecture, if we can be so formal) improved. Time was, Health Topics were one place, Encyclopedia was another, Directory, Video, News, etc and they were mostly cordoned off from one another (saved somewhat by the beauty of the faceted search engine). Those links have been improved, and most sections now allow for quick travel between other areas of the site, while remaining on a topic of interest. Widgets are also available for embedding in your own site, helping to spread the word about the MedlinePlus resource.

It is great to see such a wealth of consumer health information get an excellent facelift. It just gets easier and easier to recommend.

Other, better reviews:

• ResourceShelf (on everything)
• Krafty Librarian (on mobile version)
• Eagledawg.net (on social health)

Real-time health tracking the Tour de France

In the face of the ongoing World Cup and the recently completed Wimbledon tournament (not to mention some extraordinarily early start times on this side of the pond), the Tour de France may be getting short shrift today with casual sport fans. But, the Tour is nonetheless getting underway, and there has never been a better year for those interested in health technology to take note.

Tracking athletes’ heart rate and telemetry isn’t new for sports, really, but with the recent rise in popularity of real-time search and GPS-enabled or “locative” applications (Foursquare, etc), not to mention health tracking applications for amateur athletes (Nike+) and those with chronic diseases, this year is just ripe for this stuff.

That’s where Google comes in. Not only can you drive through the Tour route using Google Earth, but you can also follow the riders of Team HTC-Columbia in real-time on Google Maps. Even better? The team’s telemetry data including speed, pedaling cadence, heart rate and how many watts they crank out going up a mountain, is all presented right along side.

This is made possible by the riders’ health and workout data being tracked anyway by SRM — but Google is taking it a step further by mashing up that data with two of the hottest trends in web media: real-time and GPS tracking.

This sort of technology is already moving into the personal sphere; we can track our runs and cycling routes, as well as our speed and heart rate in a manner very similar to this. But even though we know we should exercise, behavior change, as Thomas Goetz points out, is one of the most difficult aspects of improving public health. It is a great shift to see the augmentation of sporting events with this kind of health data: turning idle spectator events into something that engages directly with the actual health and fitness of the athletes involved. (Isn’t that why we look up to athletes anyway?) As these tracking technologies become more mainstream, I hope it will serve as a true motivator to get out and try tracking a workout for ourselves.

If you’re up early this week, you can follow the riders here.