MassPrivateIYour phone knows everything about you — how much you walk, talk and what level of Candy Crush you’re stuck on — but soon it could be spilling secrets to your doctor.
More and more physicians are prescribing apps that help track their patients’ illnesses through information collected by their smartphones.
“[The trend] just seems to be exploding,” said Seth S. Martin, a Pollin cardiovascular prevention fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “With the widespread use now of smartphones, it’s a really exciting opportunity to help people live healthier lives.”
Apps like Ginger.io and those developed by the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs) at Northwestern University collect data through smartphones and web activity and relay that information to healthcare providers—without the patient needing to lift a finger. This, they argue, enriches the healthcare process by integrating technology and primary care.
This is most apparent with the app Ginger.io, which is currently invite only — it’s being tested in larger hospital systems before it expands to the public — and deals with a small number of specific diseases like diabetes and ulcerative colitis.
According to their website, Ginger.io “works in the background to collect data about your movement, call, and texting patterns. Once the application has gathered enough data to understand your behavior patterns, we will provide you with health insights and alerts.”
These alerts range from condition-specific health tips to insights into the patient’s own health patterns.
“It forms an automated diary of your life,” said Anmol Madan, co-founder and CEO of Ginger.io. “The idea is to provide support to patients and families.”
By collecting two forms of data — nicknamed passive and active — Ginger.io attempts to paint as full of a picture as possible from the data collected by a person’s phone. The app asks patients to fill out condition- specific surveys about their symptoms and well being (this is active data) while also collecting information from the sensors in the phone regarding calling and texting patterns as well location data (this is passive data.)
This data is then sent to a patient’s primary care physician. They use the collected data to monitor a patient’s day-to-day behavior, flare-ups and unusual patterns in communication — are you making longer calls? Maybe not moving around as much as normal?
http://wtop.com/267/3512219/Your-phone-is-talking-behind-your-back-to-your-doc
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/11/doctors-private-companies-to-spy-on.html
It sounds like this technology is assuming you are hooked up to your smartphone 24/7. We might as all well start wearing smartgarments which can detect our secretions and weight and temperature fluctuations and heartrates and transmit our every bodily function to a computerized virtual image of us. Maybe this technology can be combined with the TSA body scanning files they have on people. Maybe if our smartgarments show inactivity for too long a time, they can shock us and get us up and moving again. All remotely operated.